Recently I've been talking about implicit sharing - the idea that players create and refine content as they play, and in turn that content is automatically merged into other player's worlds. I've also been talking about how that content needs to be something with emotional meat to it. It needs to be more than just a ship with specific stats - it needs to be a story, a character, an interaction.
There's not really any existing tools or approach to allow for that kind of development, so new tools have to be created.
My first stab at it is "recasting".
Any kind of game can use recasting, but it does require a very specific kind of play format. It needs to be:
1) "Open approach": issues and challenges can be approached via a variety of means. For example, social, technological, or physical. These approaches aren't simply pass/fail, but require time and multiple attempts in order to get success.
2) "Ally NPC": Players need to be able to create and direct allied NPCs to perform tasks, including open approach tasks.
3) "Enemy NPC": Enemy NPCs can be directed inside limits if compromised: convinced, threatened, seduced, coerced, whatever method.
These three concerns basically form a system where NPCs can interact with other NPCs in a repeated, prolonged manner. The system also allows for open-ended plot lines, since you can lay down a series of plot beats and let the player traverse them using open approaches.
The recast system requires all those elements, because the idea is that different players keep playing through the quest line, but from opposite sides.
It might be easier as an example.
You're a cop (A). There was a drunken brawl and it turned deadly. You're hunting for the survivor (B), who went into hiding.
Your avatar is nerdy, so you take a technical approach - tagging his phone, looking for credit card purchases, perusing security cameras. Your success is limited, so you call in a support NPC (C) - a social cop who is assigned as your partner. He gently interrogates barkeeps, relatives, known friends... and that approach gets more success. You eventually learn that he's staying at a friend's house (D). The friend is a big bruiser of a guy.
You can tackle this however you like, but that bruiser ally makes it dangerous to just pop in and arrest him. Since you've got a social ally, you convince the bruiser to help you safely arrest the perp rather than go in guns blazing or wait around for days for him to slip up.
Mission over. Pretty simple. Everyone gets XP.
Now the mission is recast.
The next player is a cop. You're tasked with defending a witness. You start with a partner - a big bruiser kind of a guy (D). Your avatar is a social cop, an investigator (B).
You quickly learn the details. A mafia agent is hunting this witness down. He's a nerdy sort of mafioso (A), so you expect he'll use technical searches. So you take proper precautions, largely going off-grid and getting people to help you out so you don't have to use phones or credit cards. Unfortunately, the mafia agent brings in a specialist, a greasy, fast-talking knifeman (C). They interrogate the people you were relying on, and seem to be narrowing in on your position.
You decide to go on the offensive. You try to talk to the nerdy mafia lead, looking for information or even an outright ally. You don't realize that the knifeman is threatening your partner even as you speak. Even as you're trying to convert his boss, their social goon is doing the same to your team. You never realize the partner you left behind to guard the target is being compromised.
In the final, climactic scene, you are betrayed by your partner. But the mafia leaves you alive, since the nerdy lead has come to like you. You're sure she'll show up again some other mission - all these characters will.
Mission over. Everyone gets XP.
Now the mission is recast.
The next player is a cop. You're tasked with hunting down a pair of killers. You built a big bruiser of an avatar (E), and your partner is a nerdy guy (A). You decide to hit the streets - you track and intimidate the people who might know anything, and quickly get a bead on the targets. They were using social techniques to stay off-grid, but your techniques didn't involve the grid.
The two are a slick, dangerous "dame" (B) and a knuckledragger (D).
On the second day, another cop approaches you. A social specialist with a good record (C). He tells you that he was assigned this case with you, and that you should work together. He says he can convince the knuckledragger to fold, although you can tell him not to. Even as you're working this out, your partner is being seduced by the dangerous dame... do you notice in time?
You might have figured out the basic algorithm.
See, the NPCs don't really have any algorithmic personalities or behavior. But you give them commands that make sense for them - do these things, interact in these ways. Then the next player plays from the opposite side. Even as they give their own side commands that make sense, they see the NPCs you originally commanded doing the things you directed them to.
This isn't quite the same as two players directly opposing each other simultaneously. Each player is playing a one-player game. But the NPCs remember and continue to act. The steady drift in the situation as more NPCs are introduced and refined introduces a feeling of personality.
For example, at this point there is a dynamic where the social defender (B) seduces the technical offense (A). As more characters are added and the situation changes, that behavior may not make a whole lot of sense. In some cases, one or the other could even be recast as a player character again! But the two characters are now locked together by "fate": the technical offense "wants" to be seduced by the social defender, and the social defender "wants" to seduce.
So even if you are the social defender and choose a radically different approach to the setting, the instant you meet the technical offense they will fall in love with you. Similarly, if you play the technical offense, you're not going to be able to resist the social defender, no matter how good your stats are. That's your personality.
It's also important to consider continuity between missions.
No mission starts clean. All the characters you created for last mission are used in the roles of this mission. The very first player - he created a social partner (C). That social partner will be recast into another social specialist role in the next mission, and in the mission after that. This leads to tense moments where your long-time allies are caught in a dangerous web. Enemy NPCs work the same way.
In a different setup, it'd make sense for it to even be player-linked. That dangerous dame might be the funhouse mirror version of the player that created her, and therefore her progression and activities could reflect that player's ongoing activities. That player could even find that there is a funhouse mirror version of you in their world, reflecting your behaviors and actions.
Anyway, as a first stab at a system, this seems like it'd work. I haven't built a working prototype yet, though.
Friday, December 12, 2014
Wednesday, December 10, 2014
Exploration Needs Implicit Sharing
A lot of people are chatting about No Man's Sky these days, although there's not much hard data. The general consensus seems to be "WHOA! Uh... what do you DO, exactly?"
I've played a whole lot of exploration games. No Man's Sky is hardly the first. Hell, Noctis is hardly the first. I used to explore randomized worlds built in Traveler, and even that wasn't the first!
I can safely say that No Man's Sky isn't pioneering a new genre. It's simply a very shiny example within that genre.
But here's the thing people often forget: exploration is only half a game.
Right now, virtually every exploration game is a combat-survival game, which is what No Man's Sky will be. Minecraft is like this, too. I don't much like combat-survival gameplay. Not only is it overplayed, it also damages and flattens the exploration elements. Exploration is boiled down to "what resources and enemies are in the area?"
There are a lot of things we could replace combat-survival with.
The most likely replacement is creation. I think there's a lot of room to allow players to create as they explore.
The line between creation and survival is sometimes a bit thin. I mean, isn't Minecraft about creation? And if you can build your own ship to your own specs in No Man's Sky, isn't that creation?
I draw the line on the other end of the content. It's not about how well you can create things, it's about how well you can share them. See, that feeds back into exploration: if you can uncover fragments of some other player's story, that lends a lot of power to the universe.
Most games like this have some kind of explicit sharing. Share craft files, share map files. Manually download and plug in. Even if there is no actual creation at all, exploration games can get the same kind of creative sharing by sharing specific locations that have extremely interesting features, such as when people share specific random seeds for Minecraft worlds.
Explicit sharing is clumsy. It's like scribes. It's time for the printing press. It's time for implicit sharing.
Pieces of your creations will be embedded in other people's experiences automatically.
Sharing ship layouts and bases is fine, but that's the most boring possible thing to share. Instead, these games need you to share personal stories and hooks leading to more content.
For example, I build a ship knowing it'll be shared automatically with other players. So I crash it into a planet. Now I know it'll be shared as a crashed vessel. So I do a survival run - building shelter near the ship, creating basic tools and clothes from the local wildlife, and so on. Now I know that anyone that stumbles across the vessel will also stumble across my survival attempt. This is becoming a story - someone crashed and survived. Who?
That's where the story ends if you're doing combat-survival gameplay. There's no in-game method for going any further with the shared content. But in a creation-based game, you could go so much further. Embed NPCs. Embed log files. Talk about a dangerous local disease and - bang - it exists. Talk about a plot that caused your ship to crash and - bang - it exists. Set up a plot line and watch visitor's party members get caught up in it as if it were their own. Set up a culture with new customs and traditions... they bury it under 10,000 years of sand.
This kind of creation is not something you see in modern games, because it's rather difficult to achieve. I honestly don't think it's any harder than allowing us to build our own space station. It's just that we've gotten so used to building our own space stations. We know exactly how to program that tool and polish that environment.
We don't know how to allow players to create stories. We don't know how to program that tool, and we don't know how to set up that environment to be compelling.
But... I think we will discover that. Soon.
I've played a whole lot of exploration games. No Man's Sky is hardly the first. Hell, Noctis is hardly the first. I used to explore randomized worlds built in Traveler, and even that wasn't the first!
I can safely say that No Man's Sky isn't pioneering a new genre. It's simply a very shiny example within that genre.
But here's the thing people often forget: exploration is only half a game.
Right now, virtually every exploration game is a combat-survival game, which is what No Man's Sky will be. Minecraft is like this, too. I don't much like combat-survival gameplay. Not only is it overplayed, it also damages and flattens the exploration elements. Exploration is boiled down to "what resources and enemies are in the area?"
There are a lot of things we could replace combat-survival with.
The most likely replacement is creation. I think there's a lot of room to allow players to create as they explore.
The line between creation and survival is sometimes a bit thin. I mean, isn't Minecraft about creation? And if you can build your own ship to your own specs in No Man's Sky, isn't that creation?
I draw the line on the other end of the content. It's not about how well you can create things, it's about how well you can share them. See, that feeds back into exploration: if you can uncover fragments of some other player's story, that lends a lot of power to the universe.
Most games like this have some kind of explicit sharing. Share craft files, share map files. Manually download and plug in. Even if there is no actual creation at all, exploration games can get the same kind of creative sharing by sharing specific locations that have extremely interesting features, such as when people share specific random seeds for Minecraft worlds.
Explicit sharing is clumsy. It's like scribes. It's time for the printing press. It's time for implicit sharing.
Pieces of your creations will be embedded in other people's experiences automatically.
Sharing ship layouts and bases is fine, but that's the most boring possible thing to share. Instead, these games need you to share personal stories and hooks leading to more content.
For example, I build a ship knowing it'll be shared automatically with other players. So I crash it into a planet. Now I know it'll be shared as a crashed vessel. So I do a survival run - building shelter near the ship, creating basic tools and clothes from the local wildlife, and so on. Now I know that anyone that stumbles across the vessel will also stumble across my survival attempt. This is becoming a story - someone crashed and survived. Who?
That's where the story ends if you're doing combat-survival gameplay. There's no in-game method for going any further with the shared content. But in a creation-based game, you could go so much further. Embed NPCs. Embed log files. Talk about a dangerous local disease and - bang - it exists. Talk about a plot that caused your ship to crash and - bang - it exists. Set up a plot line and watch visitor's party members get caught up in it as if it were their own. Set up a culture with new customs and traditions... they bury it under 10,000 years of sand.
This kind of creation is not something you see in modern games, because it's rather difficult to achieve. I honestly don't think it's any harder than allowing us to build our own space station. It's just that we've gotten so used to building our own space stations. We know exactly how to program that tool and polish that environment.
We don't know how to allow players to create stories. We don't know how to program that tool, and we don't know how to set up that environment to be compelling.
But... I think we will discover that. Soon.
Monday, December 01, 2014
NPCs and SCREEEEN TIIIIIME
I've thought a lot about NPCs in games, and one thing I tend to forget to mention is that there are some very simple guidelines. Follow the guidelines, you tend to get great NPCs.
The most basic thing to keep in mind: in order to care about an NPC, you have to see the NPC do things.
More basically, "screen time = appreciation"
There are a lot of games where the NPCs don't have much screen time, and you are expected to "choose" who you like best. Who you want on your party, or want to talk to every day in town, or whatever.
This is really the wrong approach. If you show a bunch of options and ask someone to choose, they have to choose based on stereotypes.
It's better to never give the player a choice.
Wait, let me explain a bit more.
"Screen time = appreciation" is a powerful concept. Let's look at Final Fantasy VII, since most people will be familiar with it. Let's think about which woman your teenage-boy self had the biggest feelings for. Just bear with me if you weren't a teenage boy, the point is easiest to make like this.
The three prospective crushes are Tifa, Aerith, and Yuffie.
After playing the game, Aerith was the one everyone remembered and felt most fondly for. That's not because of her design: a painfully quiet girl in a demure dress can't visually compete against the lure of Lara Croft. I mean Tifa. Even in terms of personality, Aerith has nothing going for her - she's got no personality at all. Tifa and Yuffie both have personalities - one reliable, one annoying, both better than the play-doh brain of Aerith.
But the player's preference for the NPCs doesn't come from their visual design or their personalities. It comes strictly from how much screen time they have.
Aerith has the most screen time by an order of magnitude. Also, the quality of her screen time is very high. Not only is she usually the core focus of the cut scene, the cut scene is also usually about her. Tifa, on the other hand, often participates in cut scenes as one of the group rather than solo, and is often focused on resolving the current situation instead of building herself up.
"Yuffie has solo screen time, and everyone hated her!"
Yup! Her screen time was followed by a long stretch of the player having to wade through annoying shit with the only reward being a return to status quo. So players hated her.
But although the setup made people hate Yuffie, they did remember her. They did care about her. They did appreciate her in line with her screen time. It's just that their appreciation was of the "arrrgh youuuuuuuuuuu" nature, rather than the more positive feelings assigned to the others.
...
All the characters in all games follow this same basic rule, as you can easily find out just by looking. The reason I used FFVII is because of the clarity of the situation: Aerith is worthless as a character. She has no personality, no arc: you could replace her with a lamp and the story wouldn't change in the slightest. But she was suuuuuper popular.
Because of screen time.
Similarly, Yuffie was quite unpopular.
Because of screen time.
Obviously, the design of the character does matter some. As does what they are actually doing on screen. Also, they have to actually be doing something of their own volition: just having them participate in battles doesn't really count.
Anyway, this basic assumption can be used to really change how you design characters, and you can see that in, say, the Dragon Age games.
Dragon Age games feature a lot of incredibly uninspired character designs, but everyone likes the characters because they feel real. You know why they feel real?
SCREEEEEEEN TIIIIIIME
The characters banter with each other on the road, say character-specific combat lines, and spend an inordinate amount of time talking about their backstory if you go to camp. Combine this with a selection of character-specific missions, you have a good amount of screen time for each character. There's a lot of little details that turn "passive time" (wandering around, battle moments) into small amounts of screen time, which is powerful.
Moreover, you have a balanced amount of screen time.
Unlike FFVII, Dragon's Age gives every character a specific amount of specific types of screen time. Maybe there's 130 lines of banter dialog for each. Maybe they each have 3 sidequests. Maybe they each have 13 backstory conversations, all paced identically. Maybe they inject an identical amount of personality into their combat shouts.
Because of this balance, everyone appreciates a lot of different Dragon's Age characters. I even found myself appreciating characters I doubt I would have cared about in another game, such as the painfully generic templar or the old lady sorceress. Similarly, I found myself siding against the characters I would have picked as my favorites if I was just shown a picture and a catchphrase.
Why?
Say it with me-
screentime
The characters have balanced screen times, so I have an appreciation for all of them.
This does falter a bit here and there. You still tend to settle into one primary combat party (a huge flaw in all modern RPGs), and that affects your affections. Also, there's a ton of really dumb backstory. While it does give them more screen time, it is distractingly stupid.
But those are flaws I think could be addressed.
Anyway, that's my rant on screen time.
The most basic thing to keep in mind: in order to care about an NPC, you have to see the NPC do things.
More basically, "screen time = appreciation"
There are a lot of games where the NPCs don't have much screen time, and you are expected to "choose" who you like best. Who you want on your party, or want to talk to every day in town, or whatever.
This is really the wrong approach. If you show a bunch of options and ask someone to choose, they have to choose based on stereotypes.
It's better to never give the player a choice.
Wait, let me explain a bit more.
"Screen time = appreciation" is a powerful concept. Let's look at Final Fantasy VII, since most people will be familiar with it. Let's think about which woman your teenage-boy self had the biggest feelings for. Just bear with me if you weren't a teenage boy, the point is easiest to make like this.
The three prospective crushes are Tifa, Aerith, and Yuffie.
After playing the game, Aerith was the one everyone remembered and felt most fondly for. That's not because of her design: a painfully quiet girl in a demure dress can't visually compete against the lure of Lara Croft. I mean Tifa. Even in terms of personality, Aerith has nothing going for her - she's got no personality at all. Tifa and Yuffie both have personalities - one reliable, one annoying, both better than the play-doh brain of Aerith.
But the player's preference for the NPCs doesn't come from their visual design or their personalities. It comes strictly from how much screen time they have.
Aerith has the most screen time by an order of magnitude. Also, the quality of her screen time is very high. Not only is she usually the core focus of the cut scene, the cut scene is also usually about her. Tifa, on the other hand, often participates in cut scenes as one of the group rather than solo, and is often focused on resolving the current situation instead of building herself up.
"Yuffie has solo screen time, and everyone hated her!"
Yup! Her screen time was followed by a long stretch of the player having to wade through annoying shit with the only reward being a return to status quo. So players hated her.
But although the setup made people hate Yuffie, they did remember her. They did care about her. They did appreciate her in line with her screen time. It's just that their appreciation was of the "arrrgh youuuuuuuuuuu" nature, rather than the more positive feelings assigned to the others.
...
All the characters in all games follow this same basic rule, as you can easily find out just by looking. The reason I used FFVII is because of the clarity of the situation: Aerith is worthless as a character. She has no personality, no arc: you could replace her with a lamp and the story wouldn't change in the slightest. But she was suuuuuper popular.
Because of screen time.
Similarly, Yuffie was quite unpopular.
Because of screen time.
Obviously, the design of the character does matter some. As does what they are actually doing on screen. Also, they have to actually be doing something of their own volition: just having them participate in battles doesn't really count.
Anyway, this basic assumption can be used to really change how you design characters, and you can see that in, say, the Dragon Age games.
Dragon Age games feature a lot of incredibly uninspired character designs, but everyone likes the characters because they feel real. You know why they feel real?
SCREEEEEEEN TIIIIIIME
The characters banter with each other on the road, say character-specific combat lines, and spend an inordinate amount of time talking about their backstory if you go to camp. Combine this with a selection of character-specific missions, you have a good amount of screen time for each character. There's a lot of little details that turn "passive time" (wandering around, battle moments) into small amounts of screen time, which is powerful.
Moreover, you have a balanced amount of screen time.
Unlike FFVII, Dragon's Age gives every character a specific amount of specific types of screen time. Maybe there's 130 lines of banter dialog for each. Maybe they each have 3 sidequests. Maybe they each have 13 backstory conversations, all paced identically. Maybe they inject an identical amount of personality into their combat shouts.
Because of this balance, everyone appreciates a lot of different Dragon's Age characters. I even found myself appreciating characters I doubt I would have cared about in another game, such as the painfully generic templar or the old lady sorceress. Similarly, I found myself siding against the characters I would have picked as my favorites if I was just shown a picture and a catchphrase.
Why?
Say it with me-
screentime
The characters have balanced screen times, so I have an appreciation for all of them.
This does falter a bit here and there. You still tend to settle into one primary combat party (a huge flaw in all modern RPGs), and that affects your affections. Also, there's a ton of really dumb backstory. While it does give them more screen time, it is distractingly stupid.
But those are flaws I think could be addressed.
Anyway, that's my rant on screen time.
Friday, November 14, 2014
Creepy Closeups
Recently, a lot of games have gotten really creepy. Not because of any challenge in their gameplay, but because of the way they look when you talk to them face to face. This has always been an issue with 3D games - it was particularly groteque in the Elder Scrolls games, where they would stare flatly at you for hours. It was also notable in the Mass Effect games, where they used the same bizarre, robotic "we're done talking" animation for all three games.
These creepy interactions are only getting worse as the faces get more detailed.
At first I thought it was typical uncanny valley stuff, but it's not. Because there are many games where it's not creepy at all.
Yesterday, I finally figured it out. They're not creepy because of the number of polygons or the textures or whatever. They're creepy because they're four inches from your face and ignoring you.
When you talk to someone at close range, there's a natural rhythm to your body language. Your eyes meet and wander at a particular pace. Your faces are pointed at them or off-center or even off to the side at various times. There's a subtle action to the eyebrows, the small motions of the muscles around the eye, the corner of the mouth. These are all negotiated: depending on how comfortable you are with each other and each other's natural inclinations, you will get different pacing.
Of course, there's no way to know what sort of things the player's face is doing. Short of playing with a webcam, the game cannot react to the thousands of social cues the player is giving off. The NPC just bulls through with whatever animations are hardcoded.
This is very creepy to me. I think it's because it feels like I don't exist to these NPCs: they are talking for their own self-satisfaction and have not even the slightest care if I'm hearing them at all, let alone understanding them.
I think a lot of devs know this, because they have found a good way around it. There are many games which are not creepy despite their high-fidelity faces. The trick?
Proper cut scenes.
I know, I know. Cut scenes are cheating. But by moving the camera to the side, you let the NPC converse with the player avatar. The player is not being stared in the face - instead, the player's avatar is being stared in the face and the player is simply watching from the side. The two characters are animated together, and they react properly to each other. At the worst, they might appear to be stomping over each other's social cues, but they aren't stomping over YOUR social cues.
This has the added advantage of putting the player's avatar on-screen, up close and personal. Being able to see your avatar is great, especially if it's highly customized. It also has the advantage of showing us the player avatar's social nature - how they interact with the people they talk to in subtle ways. This makes the avatar feel like they exist as a person in that world.
Anyway, if you have detailed 3D faces with detailed 3D facial animations, think about not pointing them straight into the camera. It's creepy.
These creepy interactions are only getting worse as the faces get more detailed.
At first I thought it was typical uncanny valley stuff, but it's not. Because there are many games where it's not creepy at all.
Yesterday, I finally figured it out. They're not creepy because of the number of polygons or the textures or whatever. They're creepy because they're four inches from your face and ignoring you.
When you talk to someone at close range, there's a natural rhythm to your body language. Your eyes meet and wander at a particular pace. Your faces are pointed at them or off-center or even off to the side at various times. There's a subtle action to the eyebrows, the small motions of the muscles around the eye, the corner of the mouth. These are all negotiated: depending on how comfortable you are with each other and each other's natural inclinations, you will get different pacing.
Of course, there's no way to know what sort of things the player's face is doing. Short of playing with a webcam, the game cannot react to the thousands of social cues the player is giving off. The NPC just bulls through with whatever animations are hardcoded.
This is very creepy to me. I think it's because it feels like I don't exist to these NPCs: they are talking for their own self-satisfaction and have not even the slightest care if I'm hearing them at all, let alone understanding them.
I think a lot of devs know this, because they have found a good way around it. There are many games which are not creepy despite their high-fidelity faces. The trick?
Proper cut scenes.
I know, I know. Cut scenes are cheating. But by moving the camera to the side, you let the NPC converse with the player avatar. The player is not being stared in the face - instead, the player's avatar is being stared in the face and the player is simply watching from the side. The two characters are animated together, and they react properly to each other. At the worst, they might appear to be stomping over each other's social cues, but they aren't stomping over YOUR social cues.
This has the added advantage of putting the player's avatar on-screen, up close and personal. Being able to see your avatar is great, especially if it's highly customized. It also has the advantage of showing us the player avatar's social nature - how they interact with the people they talk to in subtle ways. This makes the avatar feel like they exist as a person in that world.
Anyway, if you have detailed 3D faces with detailed 3D facial animations, think about not pointing them straight into the camera. It's creepy.
Thursday, November 06, 2014
Connecting With Science Fiction Settings
When most people talk about creating a science fiction world, they're mostly concerned with which aliens inhabit it, what kinds of technologies exist, maybe what the visual aesthetic is. But there's another aspect that goes largely overlooked: how to connect the audience to the setting.
This is actually more fundamental than you might think, because there are a lot of ways of doing it. How you approach this will change your character design, your plots, your visuals, your pacing... it will make your universe feel solid and distinct if you think about it ahead of time.
Let's learn by example.
More specifically, it's about the experiences of people living in space. Large and small.
Because of this, rather than being about huge vistas and epic moments, Star Trek is mostly about small moments. Rather than trying to show the audience something, Star Trek usually settles for showing how the characters react to something.
For example, if the characters are trapped in a cave, the camera doesn't generally set up any long shots of desolate isolation - just a few simple shots to set the scene. The majority of the scene takes place inside the cave, right up against the faces of the crew as they shiver and talk it through.
Similarly, when ships are hit by phasers, there's rarely any shots of the ship being damaged in any significant way. Instead, we see the crew shaking, or some person getting shocked by a bursting console, and we hear the concern in Worf's voice as he reads out a number. When there's a fight, it's not blood and awesome kung fu - it's two dudes randomly staggering around and grabbing each other. However, the fight is always full of close-ups so we can see their panic or anger, and we can always hear their shouting and gasping breath. And, of course, the overly excited music stings.
This is not a weakness, because that restraint actually pays off when Star Trek does want to do something epic. When they do show a ship destroyed, or a violent fight, it has much more impact because it's not normally seen.
If you look at it like this, Star Trek is entirely constructed to let us see the characters experiencing things. The major technologies - warp drive, shields, transporters, holodeck - are all devices which give the characters more chances to go more places and see more things with a minimum of big effect shots or plot explanation. Virtual Moriarty comes alive with literally one line of explanation? OK, sounds fine. Everyone done reacting and experiencing? OK, technobabble the plot to a halt.
Star Trek is also about small experiences in a literal sense. People give recitals, play poker, hang out in the bar, hold hands, exercise, and spend quiet moments together. Not just major characters: minor ones as well. We are made to appreciate this universe because everyone we are introduced to appreciates this universe.
Most of the plot points are also about people experiencing things. Aging and deaging, being trapped alone, being trapped together, facing authorities, meeting alternate versions, getting drunk/stoned, dealing with family, dealing with sickness... Even things like being split in two: "evil Kirk" and "good Kirk" are not literally about a man split in two. They are about a man with two very different approaches to living his life.
Rather than relying on big sights or scary noises, Star Trek is mostly about showing how the cast reacts to what their character is going through. It is character-driven in a literal way: the only thing that matters is the look on the characters' faces.
A lot of genres here share a very similar approach to experiences. Detective noir and samurai films both have the same basic approach.
The idea is that the main character is very "flat". Not necessarily unemotional, but one-note.
It's hard to get invested in such a flat character, so what the director does is show them going through things we know. When Deckard is stuck in the rain, we know how that feels because we've been stuck in the rain. When Deckard gets punched, we know how that feels. When Deckard faces his abusive boss, we know how that feels.
Deckard's flat responses to these events are different from the expected response, so they are, in fact, not flat at all. Instead of thinking "Deckard's a really flat character", we think "Deckard's kind of a badass because he can take all this in stride."
Where cyberpunk stands out from similar genres is that cyberpunk is full of weird shit.
This is where Deckard's flatness works in the opposite direction. The audience is introduced to something new and bizarre - an emotion test, a vat full of eyeballs, an apartment 500 stories above the ground, a flying car. We don't know what to think of these things, because we don't know how they fit into the universe.
Deckard gives a flat response to them, and we think "oh, okay, it's pretty commonplace."
If Deckard saw a vat of eyes and went "HOLY FUCK EYEBALLS YOU SICK FUCK!!!" then we would think of the eyeball man very, very differently.
In Star Trek, we see what the characters feel. We see them reacting to experiences and situations.
But in Cyberpunk, we do the opposite. We are shown the situations and experiences, and asked to extrapolate why the characters are reacting as they are. This is powerful with flat characters, because it allows us to fill in the large gaps that their responses leave.
Star Wars characters are not flat, not ciphers. They are very vibrant, although often very stereotypical.
As you might expect, Star Wars shows us almost no ordinary sights. There is no need to show ordinary things happening, because our vibrant characters would react in an ordinary way.
In most samurai films, the samurai buys some food and eats it. We can "calibrate" off of this: the samurai's flatness contrasts with a known event.
We don't need to calibrate Han Solo, so Han is never shown buying some food and eating it. When we show him in a bar, we show him not eating or drinking or playing cards, but negotiating with a deadly bounty hunter.
Basically, Star Wars does the other half of the cyberpunk equation: it shows us amazing, bizarre things, and lets the characters comment on it. Instead of responding flatly to tell us we should take it in stride, the characters respond energetically to tell us we should be excited and amazed. The variation between the characters and their personalities and preferences allows each to step forward and show us different kinds of things, and make us excited about different things in different ways.
It's often said that Luke is a "window character", which just means he's an incredibly dull idiot that doesn't know anything. That's true: his purpose is to introduce us to the universe by being introduced to the universe himself.
But from our new perspective, all the characters are "window characters". They all try to get us excited about things. Even when C-3PO is just complaining about being lost in the desert, he's actually telling the audience how to care about Tatooine: the desert is dangerous, the sandpeople are dangerous, the jawas might be dangerous, the droids are in danger, this is a very big deal.
And the camera is showing us heat and dust and endless dunes, so we can feel what it's like to be in that desert. It's "look at this amazing thing! Do you know what it is? Well, here's a robot to tell you how amazing it is."
Star Wars shows characters reacting to extraordinary things, but rather than telling us those things are ordinary, they tell us things are amazing. Even when the characters are quite flat, such as the stoic, prickly Princess Leia, she tells us things are amazing by putting her life on the line, or demanding other people take things more seriously.
This is easy to overdo. Jar-jar is an example of a character that did exactly what I'm describing, but adults found him too obnoxious to live. Kids didn't generally mind him as much, and I think the reason is obvious: Jar-Jar reacts like a child. He tries to get the audience excited about things adults are pretty used to, and does so using the most basic kind of emotion possible. He tells us driving fast is scary. He tells us poop is smelly. He tells us that getting lost is not fun. All of these judgments are below the adult audience's level: they already have more advanced responses to these commonplace things.
Anyway, the idea is sound: use vibrant, opinionated characters to tell the audience to get excited instead of bored!
When building a game-centric IP, you have a problem in that the characters and the audience aren't nearly as distinct as they are in a movie. In some games, the distinction is pretty clear and remains clear - the avatar you control has a distinct personality and you can live with that.
Buuuuuut... in most modern RPGs and FPS games, we expect the avatar to be malleable.
Whether I decide to play as Saint P. Dungeonhealer or Bloody Monster Monster Sith, I expect the character to react in specific ways because I have decided they should react in specific ways. Even if I'm theoretically playing a real character - for example, Gordon Freeman - it's easy to overwrite their intended personality with one of my choosing.
Most games with this kind of situation have chosen to have an empty lead. The avatar has no personality worth mentioning. Their judgement is so basic and thin that it couldn't possibly interrupt the judgment we've decided they should have.
Unfortunately, this is not a very good way to connect to the universe.
To get around this, most such games have started to add in NPCs that operate close by and give you continuous feedback. You get NPCs like Cortana. She literally exists to talk at the player. She has no gameplay presence. She just comments on things that happen. Her flat personality allows you to take weird things (Ewok gunmen, 10-mile-long bridges, holographic displays) in stride. And when she does get a little serious, it tells you to take this particular weird situation seriously.
So she plays the same role as the main character in the cyberpunk genre. Even though she's not the main character.
You have games with larger rosters, like Mass Effect (or any fantasy RPG). These all use vibrant NPCs to comment on the world - typically during their introductory missions. After that they typically have very little presence, usually just doling out backstory. Despite that limitation, it's clear they play the same role as characters in Star Wars: vibrant responses to amazing things.
I think there's a few more tricks we can use.
I think it's a bad idea to leave the main avatar hollow. I think it should be feasible to let the player choose their personality at the beginning of the game, and use them as either a vibrant or flat character to help the player connect with the world continuously, over the entire course of the game.
One IP that does something like this is the Saints Row games. Although the plot is quite linear and you don't have any particular dialog choices to display personality, you get to choose the avatar's voice. And the voices are all very distinct personalities - they have strong accents and their lines are given different intonation or even changed completely. None of these voice actors blend in: they are all very strong personalities.
While the voice acting definitely makes each playthrough more distinct, Saints Row also allows the player to express themselves with their avatar very deeply. Mostly by dressing them up.
This seems really shallow, but it is actually absolutely critical for one big reason:
The player can always see the avatar. Especially in cut scenes.
Seeing someone dressed up in a suit, as a clown, or in nothing but slime makes the exact same conversation feel very different to the player, because the player is processing it. The player is processing a conversation where someone is dressed as a clown.
The player isn't processing "the dialog as written", or even "the animated scene". They are processing the final result, and that result contains someone dressed as a clown and speaking in a heavy Russian accent. It's not the same event as you intended them to experience, and the way nobody in the scene notices makes it even funnier.
What I'm trying to say is that there may be a way to connect the player to the world by letting them change the world. Or, at least, letting them change their specific experiences within the world.
Rather than trying to figure out how to make the avatar both interesting and nondescript, maybe we should try to figure out if the avatar properly allows the player to adjust the lens they see through. The avatar isn't just a character: their characterization is less important than how they let the player control how they see the world.
If the player has too much control, the world loses cohesion. For example, if the player could dress every NPC up like a clown, then they would lose distinctiveness and the reactions wouldn't be as asymmetrical. It'd be funny for one or two scenes, but lose its bite quickly.
If the player has too little control, you don't get the frission. for example, most games only give you a few pretty basic choices of costume. Even though you can see the avatar in every situation, the difference between "casual uniform" and "tank top" is not enough to make for a new angle on the world.
Well, those are my thoughts this week.
This is actually more fundamental than you might think, because there are a lot of ways of doing it. How you approach this will change your character design, your plots, your visuals, your pacing... it will make your universe feel solid and distinct if you think about it ahead of time.
Let's learn by example.
Star Trek
Star Trek is distinct from other big science fiction IPs because it is fundamentally about living in space. Not fighting in space, not adventuring in space, just living there. Sure, as time goes on it becomes more about grimdark explosions with shakycam, but the fundamentals of the universe, laid out by the first few series, are about people living in space.More specifically, it's about the experiences of people living in space. Large and small.
Because of this, rather than being about huge vistas and epic moments, Star Trek is mostly about small moments. Rather than trying to show the audience something, Star Trek usually settles for showing how the characters react to something.
For example, if the characters are trapped in a cave, the camera doesn't generally set up any long shots of desolate isolation - just a few simple shots to set the scene. The majority of the scene takes place inside the cave, right up against the faces of the crew as they shiver and talk it through.
Similarly, when ships are hit by phasers, there's rarely any shots of the ship being damaged in any significant way. Instead, we see the crew shaking, or some person getting shocked by a bursting console, and we hear the concern in Worf's voice as he reads out a number. When there's a fight, it's not blood and awesome kung fu - it's two dudes randomly staggering around and grabbing each other. However, the fight is always full of close-ups so we can see their panic or anger, and we can always hear their shouting and gasping breath. And, of course, the overly excited music stings.
This is not a weakness, because that restraint actually pays off when Star Trek does want to do something epic. When they do show a ship destroyed, or a violent fight, it has much more impact because it's not normally seen.
If you look at it like this, Star Trek is entirely constructed to let us see the characters experiencing things. The major technologies - warp drive, shields, transporters, holodeck - are all devices which give the characters more chances to go more places and see more things with a minimum of big effect shots or plot explanation. Virtual Moriarty comes alive with literally one line of explanation? OK, sounds fine. Everyone done reacting and experiencing? OK, technobabble the plot to a halt.
Star Trek is also about small experiences in a literal sense. People give recitals, play poker, hang out in the bar, hold hands, exercise, and spend quiet moments together. Not just major characters: minor ones as well. We are made to appreciate this universe because everyone we are introduced to appreciates this universe.
Most of the plot points are also about people experiencing things. Aging and deaging, being trapped alone, being trapped together, facing authorities, meeting alternate versions, getting drunk/stoned, dealing with family, dealing with sickness... Even things like being split in two: "evil Kirk" and "good Kirk" are not literally about a man split in two. They are about a man with two very different approaches to living his life.
Rather than relying on big sights or scary noises, Star Trek is mostly about showing how the cast reacts to what their character is going through. It is character-driven in a literal way: the only thing that matters is the look on the characters' faces.
Cyberpunk/Noir
Cyberpunk is sort of the exact opposite of Star Trek - people live their life in Star Trek, people die like dogs in Cyberpunk.A lot of genres here share a very similar approach to experiences. Detective noir and samurai films both have the same basic approach.
The idea is that the main character is very "flat". Not necessarily unemotional, but one-note.
It's hard to get invested in such a flat character, so what the director does is show them going through things we know. When Deckard is stuck in the rain, we know how that feels because we've been stuck in the rain. When Deckard gets punched, we know how that feels. When Deckard faces his abusive boss, we know how that feels.
Deckard's flat responses to these events are different from the expected response, so they are, in fact, not flat at all. Instead of thinking "Deckard's a really flat character", we think "Deckard's kind of a badass because he can take all this in stride."
Where cyberpunk stands out from similar genres is that cyberpunk is full of weird shit.
This is where Deckard's flatness works in the opposite direction. The audience is introduced to something new and bizarre - an emotion test, a vat full of eyeballs, an apartment 500 stories above the ground, a flying car. We don't know what to think of these things, because we don't know how they fit into the universe.
Deckard gives a flat response to them, and we think "oh, okay, it's pretty commonplace."
If Deckard saw a vat of eyes and went "HOLY FUCK EYEBALLS YOU SICK FUCK!!!" then we would think of the eyeball man very, very differently.
In Star Trek, we see what the characters feel. We see them reacting to experiences and situations.
But in Cyberpunk, we do the opposite. We are shown the situations and experiences, and asked to extrapolate why the characters are reacting as they are. This is powerful with flat characters, because it allows us to fill in the large gaps that their responses leave.
Star Wars
Star Wars is based on samurai movies. We mentioned before: samurai movies are about flat characters. We are shown things that happen to the samurai characters, and are asked to imagine what the character must be feeling but not showing. That's why most samurai films feature a whole lot of "commonplace" events, such as the samurai buying and eating a snack.Star Wars characters are not flat, not ciphers. They are very vibrant, although often very stereotypical.
As you might expect, Star Wars shows us almost no ordinary sights. There is no need to show ordinary things happening, because our vibrant characters would react in an ordinary way.
In most samurai films, the samurai buys some food and eats it. We can "calibrate" off of this: the samurai's flatness contrasts with a known event.
We don't need to calibrate Han Solo, so Han is never shown buying some food and eating it. When we show him in a bar, we show him not eating or drinking or playing cards, but negotiating with a deadly bounty hunter.
Basically, Star Wars does the other half of the cyberpunk equation: it shows us amazing, bizarre things, and lets the characters comment on it. Instead of responding flatly to tell us we should take it in stride, the characters respond energetically to tell us we should be excited and amazed. The variation between the characters and their personalities and preferences allows each to step forward and show us different kinds of things, and make us excited about different things in different ways.
It's often said that Luke is a "window character", which just means he's an incredibly dull idiot that doesn't know anything. That's true: his purpose is to introduce us to the universe by being introduced to the universe himself.
But from our new perspective, all the characters are "window characters". They all try to get us excited about things. Even when C-3PO is just complaining about being lost in the desert, he's actually telling the audience how to care about Tatooine: the desert is dangerous, the sandpeople are dangerous, the jawas might be dangerous, the droids are in danger, this is a very big deal.
And the camera is showing us heat and dust and endless dunes, so we can feel what it's like to be in that desert. It's "look at this amazing thing! Do you know what it is? Well, here's a robot to tell you how amazing it is."
Star Wars shows characters reacting to extraordinary things, but rather than telling us those things are ordinary, they tell us things are amazing. Even when the characters are quite flat, such as the stoic, prickly Princess Leia, she tells us things are amazing by putting her life on the line, or demanding other people take things more seriously.
This is easy to overdo. Jar-jar is an example of a character that did exactly what I'm describing, but adults found him too obnoxious to live. Kids didn't generally mind him as much, and I think the reason is obvious: Jar-Jar reacts like a child. He tries to get the audience excited about things adults are pretty used to, and does so using the most basic kind of emotion possible. He tells us driving fast is scary. He tells us poop is smelly. He tells us that getting lost is not fun. All of these judgments are below the adult audience's level: they already have more advanced responses to these commonplace things.
Anyway, the idea is sound: use vibrant, opinionated characters to tell the audience to get excited instead of bored!
Games
A lot of science fiction IP is either making the transition to games, or is starting as a game. Mass Effect, as an easy example.When building a game-centric IP, you have a problem in that the characters and the audience aren't nearly as distinct as they are in a movie. In some games, the distinction is pretty clear and remains clear - the avatar you control has a distinct personality and you can live with that.
Buuuuuut... in most modern RPGs and FPS games, we expect the avatar to be malleable.
Whether I decide to play as Saint P. Dungeonhealer or Bloody Monster Monster Sith, I expect the character to react in specific ways because I have decided they should react in specific ways. Even if I'm theoretically playing a real character - for example, Gordon Freeman - it's easy to overwrite their intended personality with one of my choosing.
Most games with this kind of situation have chosen to have an empty lead. The avatar has no personality worth mentioning. Their judgement is so basic and thin that it couldn't possibly interrupt the judgment we've decided they should have.
Unfortunately, this is not a very good way to connect to the universe.
To get around this, most such games have started to add in NPCs that operate close by and give you continuous feedback. You get NPCs like Cortana. She literally exists to talk at the player. She has no gameplay presence. She just comments on things that happen. Her flat personality allows you to take weird things (Ewok gunmen, 10-mile-long bridges, holographic displays) in stride. And when she does get a little serious, it tells you to take this particular weird situation seriously.
So she plays the same role as the main character in the cyberpunk genre. Even though she's not the main character.
You have games with larger rosters, like Mass Effect (or any fantasy RPG). These all use vibrant NPCs to comment on the world - typically during their introductory missions. After that they typically have very little presence, usually just doling out backstory. Despite that limitation, it's clear they play the same role as characters in Star Wars: vibrant responses to amazing things.
I think there's a few more tricks we can use.
I think it's a bad idea to leave the main avatar hollow. I think it should be feasible to let the player choose their personality at the beginning of the game, and use them as either a vibrant or flat character to help the player connect with the world continuously, over the entire course of the game.
One IP that does something like this is the Saints Row games. Although the plot is quite linear and you don't have any particular dialog choices to display personality, you get to choose the avatar's voice. And the voices are all very distinct personalities - they have strong accents and their lines are given different intonation or even changed completely. None of these voice actors blend in: they are all very strong personalities.
While the voice acting definitely makes each playthrough more distinct, Saints Row also allows the player to express themselves with their avatar very deeply. Mostly by dressing them up.
This seems really shallow, but it is actually absolutely critical for one big reason:
The player can always see the avatar. Especially in cut scenes.
Seeing someone dressed up in a suit, as a clown, or in nothing but slime makes the exact same conversation feel very different to the player, because the player is processing it. The player is processing a conversation where someone is dressed as a clown.
The player isn't processing "the dialog as written", or even "the animated scene". They are processing the final result, and that result contains someone dressed as a clown and speaking in a heavy Russian accent. It's not the same event as you intended them to experience, and the way nobody in the scene notices makes it even funnier.
What I'm trying to say is that there may be a way to connect the player to the world by letting them change the world. Or, at least, letting them change their specific experiences within the world.
Rather than trying to figure out how to make the avatar both interesting and nondescript, maybe we should try to figure out if the avatar properly allows the player to adjust the lens they see through. The avatar isn't just a character: their characterization is less important than how they let the player control how they see the world.
If the player has too much control, the world loses cohesion. For example, if the player could dress every NPC up like a clown, then they would lose distinctiveness and the reactions wouldn't be as asymmetrical. It'd be funny for one or two scenes, but lose its bite quickly.
If the player has too little control, you don't get the frission. for example, most games only give you a few pretty basic choices of costume. Even though you can see the avatar in every situation, the difference between "casual uniform" and "tank top" is not enough to make for a new angle on the world.
Well, those are my thoughts this week.
Tuesday, November 04, 2014
Complexity and the Non-Genre Game
I've been thinking about gameplay complexity. It's a big question for me, because most of my games are not strict genre games.
Genres acquire a lot of complexity - players become familiar with the standard play and that lets you add more complexity on top of it. A good example of this is any recent Street Fighter game: cancels, partial supers, half-dozen bars that go up and down arbitrarily, gem power-ups, counterthrows, tag juggles, dizzy mechanics...
Street Fighter is a good example of the issues involved, because fighting games are something everything thinks should be easy to understand... then they try it out and they don't even realize that a "throw" is a thing, let alone a partial-super-rolled-into-a-cancel-quick-throw-followed-with-a-tag-juggle-into-a-full-super-filling-a-gem-quota...
When you are building a non-genre game, everyone is that person who thinks it should be easy to understand. There are no people that already know the rules.
You can design a simple game. It is possible to make a compelling, simple game. Threes and Triple Town both use very simple, approachable mechanics. These are great designs, but they are simple games. They use randomness and tight constraints in a very tight loop.
Another reason to go simple is to have a smooth curve, and introduce more complexity as the player gets used to it as it is. This leads to half your game being a tutorial, but more than that, it's not a very good way to do things.
In every game, you'll hopefully be exploring a particular kind of experience or play. If your game is a genre game, you can build off of genre play to explore something at the fringes. A good example of this is the proliferation of 'shtick platformers' where you have all the normal platforming play plus one trick.
But in a non-genre game, there is no base foundation of "platforming". Whatever your core experience is, it's going to be what you're exploring. If you try to explore that and then make it more complex, that's not a good formula. You're trying to create a genre in the first part of your game, and that's not going to work out. Not least because your player simply can't internalize a genre that fast.
That isn't to say all non-genre games have to be simple!
There's a lot of power in complexity. However, you need to be careful when you approach it. If you want a non-genre game that has progression and is kinda biggish, there are two approaches you'll probably think of, three you might not, and a bad one.
1) Width. This is when you add more kinds of the same play. For example, in an RPG you add enemies with different stats, you have several different modes of attacking, you have several different numbers that need to be optimized, etc. In TripleTown, you have many different kinds of combinable resources.
2) Constraints. This is when you vary the constraints to pace the player and guide them through the experience. In an RPG you move from town to town, each one with different enemies, different equipment, different visuals, even different party members. The most common constraint is randomness: Threes and TripleTown both use randomness. RPGs typically have random battles.
3) Emergence. Emergence is a bit complicated because it's very easy to think you have emergence when you don't. RPGs almost never use emergence because they want a tight grip on the pacing and progression, and it's hard to predict exactly how things will emerge for each player. Still, it's valuable: Threes uses emergence because the player's previous accomplishments leave ever more high-number tiles clogging the board.
4) Construction. When the player creates something, it creates an effect on how the other parts of the game play. Examples include leveling up a character, building a rocket, forming a party in WoW, etc. This can be tightly or loosely controlled, so it is important to know how much freedom to change the world you should give the player.
5) Multiplayer. Allowing players to compare themselves to other players or incorporate other players' choices can be very interesting. Sometimes synchronous (perhaps even local) multiplayer is the answer, but don't overlook asynchronous or implicit multiplayer if your game involves creating content. Dragon's Dogma does this reasonably well.
6) Maze of Actions. A lot of games aim for complexity by simply being incredibly complex. An example of this would be Street Fighter, which has a massive number of different elements in play all the time, making it almost impenetrable for a new player. None of the kinds of play are variations on a theme - each is a completely different thing to consider - gems, counting events, canceling, supers, block-breaking, throws, tag teams... they do combine into one experience, but it's convoluted as hell to understand all the pieces that flow together.
In general, using several of these is a good idea, as each is more or less effective for any given player.
The reason I'm talking about this in such detail is because I'm coming at it from both sides today.
I read an article about "simplifying" RPGs - removing most of the numbers from them. And I'm also considering how to build my xenodiplomacy game, which isn't a genre title.
When it comes to simplifying an RPG, you need to consider all the complexity that RPGs have built up over the years. Most of an RPG's complexity comes from width and constraints. Balancing stats is one of the core play elements, although it's made interesting less by being hard and more by being wide: there are dozens of stats and hundreds of equipment options that affect various stats in various ways.
If you were to remove that or dumb it down, you would be removing one of the core complex aspects. This would make the RPG easier to approach, but it would also reduce the long-term complexity of the game. To deal with that, we would need to add meat somewhere else in the title. Perhaps widen another kind of play (the interpersonal conversations?), introduce some emergence/deeper construction, or add in some multiplayer elements.
This is far from being a theoretical problem. Dragon's Dogma did exactly this. It radically simplified stats and talent suites, and added in a mild asynchronous multiplayer element in that half your party was made up of characters other players had designed. Dragon's Dogma also widened the combat system, having three kinds of intertwined combat (melee, ranged, and anti-titan) plus support rather than just one plus support.
Well, what I'm trying to say is that removing complexity from a genre title makes it more approachable, but you need to be careful. The balance in a genre game is very carefully grown from decades of experience, and hacking off bits willy-nilly results in a really awkward result.
On the other side of the spectrum is non-genre games trying to add complexity.
I have a xenodiplomacy game brewing in my mind, but it's difficult to have the right amount of complexity. Too little complexity and the game grows stale. Too much complexity, nobody can figure out how to play it. This is made more complex by my insistence on having social characters - that is, characters you can get to know, can affect, and that can affect you.
As normally considered, socializing is "non-core". That is, it's not really gameplay: it's a pacing system. As the player progresses through the core game, they steadily have more opportunities to socialize with their allies. But in order for that to work, the core play needs to reflect those characters and reflect onto them, so that they matter. See: every Ubisoft RPG.
In general, this is handled very badly. The concept of an "open party RPG" is deeply flawed, because I don't know anyone that uses a majority of the characters: everyone settles on their favorite party and that's that. This means that all the other party members are almost completely detached from the core gameplay. Same problem as a dating game: you're supposed to ignore 90% of the characters.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of ways around this. Have only 3 NPCs. Force the player to cycle NPCs. Allow a tactical role for every NPC. Etc.
The other solution is to do the opposite. Make the socializing core.
This is an interesting challenge because it's not really the approved approach. Even in dating games, it's not usually about socializing. It's about grinding for stats or cash or whatever. The socializing is just canned dialog -> A, B, or C choice -> stat/item check.
Creating social play is a really interesting challenge, and in a xenodiplomacy game it might actually make a fair amount of sense. It's not about simulating a conversation. It's about two aliens trying to make each other more comfortable, even though they have almost no method of communicating directly.
Social play doesn't have to be about jabbering face to face. It can involve base-building (a comfortable habitat), body language, creating customized gifts (not buying canned gifts), planning safe and interesting events... Or, of course, it can be some kind of simulation of painstakingly mistranslated conversation, whatever.
Whichever way you take it, though, the social play is non-genre. This means that if it's very complex, the players will feel extremely lost. So if I do make social play more than "choose A, B, or C", I have to take a very careful path towards complexity. Width, constraints, emergence, construction, and multiplayer are all on the table, but it's up to me to figure out what the hell to actually DO.
Even if I back off and make it non-core, I still need core gameplay that ties into them. That's going to be complex, so it might be best to steal a genre for that part so the players don't feel lost.
Well, my instinct is that the social play is the same as the diplomatic play, just with a different set of constraints. But that's as far as I've really gotten so far.
Genres acquire a lot of complexity - players become familiar with the standard play and that lets you add more complexity on top of it. A good example of this is any recent Street Fighter game: cancels, partial supers, half-dozen bars that go up and down arbitrarily, gem power-ups, counterthrows, tag juggles, dizzy mechanics...
Street Fighter is a good example of the issues involved, because fighting games are something everything thinks should be easy to understand... then they try it out and they don't even realize that a "throw" is a thing, let alone a partial-super-rolled-into-a-cancel-quick-throw-followed-with-a-tag-juggle-into-a-full-super-filling-a-gem-quota...
When you are building a non-genre game, everyone is that person who thinks it should be easy to understand. There are no people that already know the rules.
You can design a simple game. It is possible to make a compelling, simple game. Threes and Triple Town both use very simple, approachable mechanics. These are great designs, but they are simple games. They use randomness and tight constraints in a very tight loop.
Another reason to go simple is to have a smooth curve, and introduce more complexity as the player gets used to it as it is. This leads to half your game being a tutorial, but more than that, it's not a very good way to do things.
In every game, you'll hopefully be exploring a particular kind of experience or play. If your game is a genre game, you can build off of genre play to explore something at the fringes. A good example of this is the proliferation of 'shtick platformers' where you have all the normal platforming play plus one trick.
But in a non-genre game, there is no base foundation of "platforming". Whatever your core experience is, it's going to be what you're exploring. If you try to explore that and then make it more complex, that's not a good formula. You're trying to create a genre in the first part of your game, and that's not going to work out. Not least because your player simply can't internalize a genre that fast.
That isn't to say all non-genre games have to be simple!
There's a lot of power in complexity. However, you need to be careful when you approach it. If you want a non-genre game that has progression and is kinda biggish, there are two approaches you'll probably think of, three you might not, and a bad one.
1) Width. This is when you add more kinds of the same play. For example, in an RPG you add enemies with different stats, you have several different modes of attacking, you have several different numbers that need to be optimized, etc. In TripleTown, you have many different kinds of combinable resources.
2) Constraints. This is when you vary the constraints to pace the player and guide them through the experience. In an RPG you move from town to town, each one with different enemies, different equipment, different visuals, even different party members. The most common constraint is randomness: Threes and TripleTown both use randomness. RPGs typically have random battles.
3) Emergence. Emergence is a bit complicated because it's very easy to think you have emergence when you don't. RPGs almost never use emergence because they want a tight grip on the pacing and progression, and it's hard to predict exactly how things will emerge for each player. Still, it's valuable: Threes uses emergence because the player's previous accomplishments leave ever more high-number tiles clogging the board.
4) Construction. When the player creates something, it creates an effect on how the other parts of the game play. Examples include leveling up a character, building a rocket, forming a party in WoW, etc. This can be tightly or loosely controlled, so it is important to know how much freedom to change the world you should give the player.
5) Multiplayer. Allowing players to compare themselves to other players or incorporate other players' choices can be very interesting. Sometimes synchronous (perhaps even local) multiplayer is the answer, but don't overlook asynchronous or implicit multiplayer if your game involves creating content. Dragon's Dogma does this reasonably well.
6) Maze of Actions. A lot of games aim for complexity by simply being incredibly complex. An example of this would be Street Fighter, which has a massive number of different elements in play all the time, making it almost impenetrable for a new player. None of the kinds of play are variations on a theme - each is a completely different thing to consider - gems, counting events, canceling, supers, block-breaking, throws, tag teams... they do combine into one experience, but it's convoluted as hell to understand all the pieces that flow together.
In general, using several of these is a good idea, as each is more or less effective for any given player.
The reason I'm talking about this in such detail is because I'm coming at it from both sides today.
I read an article about "simplifying" RPGs - removing most of the numbers from them. And I'm also considering how to build my xenodiplomacy game, which isn't a genre title.
When it comes to simplifying an RPG, you need to consider all the complexity that RPGs have built up over the years. Most of an RPG's complexity comes from width and constraints. Balancing stats is one of the core play elements, although it's made interesting less by being hard and more by being wide: there are dozens of stats and hundreds of equipment options that affect various stats in various ways.
If you were to remove that or dumb it down, you would be removing one of the core complex aspects. This would make the RPG easier to approach, but it would also reduce the long-term complexity of the game. To deal with that, we would need to add meat somewhere else in the title. Perhaps widen another kind of play (the interpersonal conversations?), introduce some emergence/deeper construction, or add in some multiplayer elements.
This is far from being a theoretical problem. Dragon's Dogma did exactly this. It radically simplified stats and talent suites, and added in a mild asynchronous multiplayer element in that half your party was made up of characters other players had designed. Dragon's Dogma also widened the combat system, having three kinds of intertwined combat (melee, ranged, and anti-titan) plus support rather than just one plus support.
Well, what I'm trying to say is that removing complexity from a genre title makes it more approachable, but you need to be careful. The balance in a genre game is very carefully grown from decades of experience, and hacking off bits willy-nilly results in a really awkward result.
On the other side of the spectrum is non-genre games trying to add complexity.
I have a xenodiplomacy game brewing in my mind, but it's difficult to have the right amount of complexity. Too little complexity and the game grows stale. Too much complexity, nobody can figure out how to play it. This is made more complex by my insistence on having social characters - that is, characters you can get to know, can affect, and that can affect you.
As normally considered, socializing is "non-core". That is, it's not really gameplay: it's a pacing system. As the player progresses through the core game, they steadily have more opportunities to socialize with their allies. But in order for that to work, the core play needs to reflect those characters and reflect onto them, so that they matter. See: every Ubisoft RPG.
In general, this is handled very badly. The concept of an "open party RPG" is deeply flawed, because I don't know anyone that uses a majority of the characters: everyone settles on their favorite party and that's that. This means that all the other party members are almost completely detached from the core gameplay. Same problem as a dating game: you're supposed to ignore 90% of the characters.
Just off the top of my head, I can think of ways around this. Have only 3 NPCs. Force the player to cycle NPCs. Allow a tactical role for every NPC. Etc.
The other solution is to do the opposite. Make the socializing core.
This is an interesting challenge because it's not really the approved approach. Even in dating games, it's not usually about socializing. It's about grinding for stats or cash or whatever. The socializing is just canned dialog -> A, B, or C choice -> stat/item check.
Creating social play is a really interesting challenge, and in a xenodiplomacy game it might actually make a fair amount of sense. It's not about simulating a conversation. It's about two aliens trying to make each other more comfortable, even though they have almost no method of communicating directly.
Social play doesn't have to be about jabbering face to face. It can involve base-building (a comfortable habitat), body language, creating customized gifts (not buying canned gifts), planning safe and interesting events... Or, of course, it can be some kind of simulation of painstakingly mistranslated conversation, whatever.
Whichever way you take it, though, the social play is non-genre. This means that if it's very complex, the players will feel extremely lost. So if I do make social play more than "choose A, B, or C", I have to take a very careful path towards complexity. Width, constraints, emergence, construction, and multiplayer are all on the table, but it's up to me to figure out what the hell to actually DO.
Even if I back off and make it non-core, I still need core gameplay that ties into them. That's going to be complex, so it might be best to steal a genre for that part so the players don't feel lost.
Well, my instinct is that the social play is the same as the diplomatic play, just with a different set of constraints. But that's as far as I've really gotten so far.
Friday, October 17, 2014
Characters in Noncombat RPGs
Last essay I wrote about a mechanic that can be used in noncombat RPGs. Because the noncombat conflict gameplay is so slow compared to combat, you need to have a tighter relationship between it and other kinds of gameplay.
But there is another big problem with noncombat RPGs: stakes.
To be more clear, players judge the characters in an RPG based on how they face death and challenge, how they respond to threats, and what they want to accomplish. Most NPCs are brought together to try and save the universe, and that's a big part of why the player can respect them. There is usually one NPC that's on board for some other reason (money, escape, duty, simple friendship), but their motives are usually considered "lesser". In fact, their character arc is almost certainly to develop the same world-saving impulse as everyone else.
Well, in our NONcombat RPG, you probably aren't trying to save the universe. It's possible to cram universe-saving into the setting, but it usually ends up feeling rather hilarious: "saving the universe by repairing damaged factories!" "Saving the universe by dancing!" It's, uh... pretty forced.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be about saving the universe.
I said before that we should look at our standard game stuff and try to figure out what it accomplishes, so we can find other ways to accomplish the same things. Typically, I explore different kinds of gameplay. But the framing of the narrative is also a piece of the game. It also accomplishes something.
It gives all of the characters the same moral and thematic backdrop. Because we can see how they respond to the same questions, we can see their distinct nature.
Nearly all of the characters in Mass Effect echo the central conflict of the Reapers. Tali's species created the Geth, then tried to exterminate them before they could become a threat. Mordin chose to keep the dangerous Krogan suppressed, and explores the ethics of that. Garrus explores the nature of laws and law enforcement, which first appears to be an echo of your human culture's interests, but then appears to be an echo of your larger fight against the Reapers. Liara's endless hunger for information and gradual descent into amoral infobrokering mirrors the Reapers' own hunger for new information. Ashley's racism reflects the Reapers'... well, it goes on.
It could be that the Mass Effect designers didn't realize they were doing this kind of echoing. If they were obsessed with oppression and the nature of power, their own obsession would have been reflected into the characters. It's hard to tell just by looking whether it was on purpose or on accident.
Dragon Age is similar. The characters are all meditations on the nature of undeserved/corrupting power. Again, it's hard to tell whether it was on purpose, or just because the devs were obsessed with that concept.
This is common. In FF6, the characters were obsessed with the concept of identity. In Chrono Trigger, they were obsessed with the nature of change and endings.
The overarching plot explores this concept as well. It is a capstone: all the characters shine their lights on the concepts in their own way. You pile them up and the capstone makes them hold together.
The fact that it's a save-the-world plot is just a wrapper. It's a convenient wrapper, because it A) gets the player a bit pumped and B) allows you to pull a bunch of characters together without too much effort. It's the "you're all in a tavern when..." of computer games.
The question isn't "can we make a noncombat game about saving the world". The question is "can we create a plot with a theme that holds the characters together, and make sure the player finds it compelling?"
The answer is yes and yes, but it requires some thought.
Let's think about our tiny little game design about people who run around and repair broken space stations. Due to the nature of the conflicts, our theme would probably be best as "complexity is a tradeoff". In turn, our characters would explore this concept in their own way.
This could be as simple as "this character has OCD and is obsessed with organizing minutiae", but that's a poor way to design a major character. They aren't just sticking to a theme: they're exploring it. So they generally have an arc related to it. Sometimes an arc works as "they reverse their issue" - cowardly to brave, loner to team player, etc. But those are traits everyone empathizes with, so it's easy to get inside the character's head. Obsessing over details is typically a distancing trait, actually pushing the character further away from both the audience and the other characters. Therefore, the best arc is not "stops being OCD", but is instead something that directly relates them to other characters. For example, goes from having an obsessive crush on the robot party member (no bacteria! No fluids!) to a more gentle romance with a completely different character.
This kind of arc explores how obsessing over details and minutiae affects his or her life. This is how the most compelling characters are created.
All the characters need to have that kind of thought put into them.
And the game's overarching plot also needs to have that kind of thought put into it.
As the capstone, the whole universe needs to be exploring the tradeoffs of complexity and simplicity. It could start small: many of the causes of breakdowns are bacteria that are really hard to get rid of, bacteria that constantly adapts to changing environments and eats plastic, rubber, glass, buckyballs, whatever.
This should be combined with a civilization groaning under its own complexity. Millions of trade agreements and billions of trade routes. Cultures with complex rules of interaction to keep people safe from each other. Governments that sign budgets, laws, and treaties into being but literally cannot understand them, as they are far too complex and apply too broadly.
The culmination would be a coup against the government. However, rather than being on one side or the other, the player party is just trying to keep people alive. By this time, the player should be able to "read ahead" and tell what kind of breakdowns are going to occur, and show up with just the right goods to repair everything. The civilization becomes largely cut off from itself as things collapse, but the player can tell various settlements to ship various things to various places, dragging the fractured system back into alignment, restoring everything to how it was. Then end on some kind of hopeful note.
This is a relatively good theme. Moreover, it gives us an easy chance to recruit NPCs by the bushel. Any NPC that lives anywhere where anything breaks down could have an interest in signing on to your crew, as well as anthropologists, entertainers, wannabee politicians, explorers, merchants: all have some interest in joining your ship.
And all of them have something to say about the tradeoffs of complexity.
But there is another big problem with noncombat RPGs: stakes.
To be more clear, players judge the characters in an RPG based on how they face death and challenge, how they respond to threats, and what they want to accomplish. Most NPCs are brought together to try and save the universe, and that's a big part of why the player can respect them. There is usually one NPC that's on board for some other reason (money, escape, duty, simple friendship), but their motives are usually considered "lesser". In fact, their character arc is almost certainly to develop the same world-saving impulse as everyone else.
Well, in our NONcombat RPG, you probably aren't trying to save the universe. It's possible to cram universe-saving into the setting, but it usually ends up feeling rather hilarious: "saving the universe by repairing damaged factories!" "Saving the universe by dancing!" It's, uh... pretty forced.
Fortunately, it doesn't have to be about saving the universe.
I said before that we should look at our standard game stuff and try to figure out what it accomplishes, so we can find other ways to accomplish the same things. Typically, I explore different kinds of gameplay. But the framing of the narrative is also a piece of the game. It also accomplishes something.
It gives all of the characters the same moral and thematic backdrop. Because we can see how they respond to the same questions, we can see their distinct nature.
Nearly all of the characters in Mass Effect echo the central conflict of the Reapers. Tali's species created the Geth, then tried to exterminate them before they could become a threat. Mordin chose to keep the dangerous Krogan suppressed, and explores the ethics of that. Garrus explores the nature of laws and law enforcement, which first appears to be an echo of your human culture's interests, but then appears to be an echo of your larger fight against the Reapers. Liara's endless hunger for information and gradual descent into amoral infobrokering mirrors the Reapers' own hunger for new information. Ashley's racism reflects the Reapers'... well, it goes on.
It could be that the Mass Effect designers didn't realize they were doing this kind of echoing. If they were obsessed with oppression and the nature of power, their own obsession would have been reflected into the characters. It's hard to tell just by looking whether it was on purpose or on accident.
Dragon Age is similar. The characters are all meditations on the nature of undeserved/corrupting power. Again, it's hard to tell whether it was on purpose, or just because the devs were obsessed with that concept.
This is common. In FF6, the characters were obsessed with the concept of identity. In Chrono Trigger, they were obsessed with the nature of change and endings.
The overarching plot explores this concept as well. It is a capstone: all the characters shine their lights on the concepts in their own way. You pile them up and the capstone makes them hold together.
The fact that it's a save-the-world plot is just a wrapper. It's a convenient wrapper, because it A) gets the player a bit pumped and B) allows you to pull a bunch of characters together without too much effort. It's the "you're all in a tavern when..." of computer games.
The question isn't "can we make a noncombat game about saving the world". The question is "can we create a plot with a theme that holds the characters together, and make sure the player finds it compelling?"
The answer is yes and yes, but it requires some thought.
Let's think about our tiny little game design about people who run around and repair broken space stations. Due to the nature of the conflicts, our theme would probably be best as "complexity is a tradeoff". In turn, our characters would explore this concept in their own way.
This could be as simple as "this character has OCD and is obsessed with organizing minutiae", but that's a poor way to design a major character. They aren't just sticking to a theme: they're exploring it. So they generally have an arc related to it. Sometimes an arc works as "they reverse their issue" - cowardly to brave, loner to team player, etc. But those are traits everyone empathizes with, so it's easy to get inside the character's head. Obsessing over details is typically a distancing trait, actually pushing the character further away from both the audience and the other characters. Therefore, the best arc is not "stops being OCD", but is instead something that directly relates them to other characters. For example, goes from having an obsessive crush on the robot party member (no bacteria! No fluids!) to a more gentle romance with a completely different character.
This kind of arc explores how obsessing over details and minutiae affects his or her life. This is how the most compelling characters are created.
All the characters need to have that kind of thought put into them.
And the game's overarching plot also needs to have that kind of thought put into it.
As the capstone, the whole universe needs to be exploring the tradeoffs of complexity and simplicity. It could start small: many of the causes of breakdowns are bacteria that are really hard to get rid of, bacteria that constantly adapts to changing environments and eats plastic, rubber, glass, buckyballs, whatever.
This should be combined with a civilization groaning under its own complexity. Millions of trade agreements and billions of trade routes. Cultures with complex rules of interaction to keep people safe from each other. Governments that sign budgets, laws, and treaties into being but literally cannot understand them, as they are far too complex and apply too broadly.
The culmination would be a coup against the government. However, rather than being on one side or the other, the player party is just trying to keep people alive. By this time, the player should be able to "read ahead" and tell what kind of breakdowns are going to occur, and show up with just the right goods to repair everything. The civilization becomes largely cut off from itself as things collapse, but the player can tell various settlements to ship various things to various places, dragging the fractured system back into alignment, restoring everything to how it was. Then end on some kind of hopeful note.
This is a relatively good theme. Moreover, it gives us an easy chance to recruit NPCs by the bushel. Any NPC that lives anywhere where anything breaks down could have an interest in signing on to your crew, as well as anthropologists, entertainers, wannabee politicians, explorers, merchants: all have some interest in joining your ship.
And all of them have something to say about the tradeoffs of complexity.
Thursday, October 16, 2014
Designing Noncombat RPGs
In my last essay I talked about parts of the RPG experience I love. In the one before that, I talked about how we can put aside standard gameplay tropes if we understand what player experiences are created by that gameplay and do it another way.
Now I'm going to combine the two and talk about a noncombat RPG.
There are few "noncombat RPGs". They are never very good, because the entire idea of an RPG is based around combat.
Sure, all the gameplay loops orbit the concept of combat. Even above that, the way we consider fantasy worlds is through the lens of combat.
For example, I can simply swap combat out with something that is almost mechanically identical. Poker, for example. But the RPG will still end up bad, because the concept of poker players saving the universe is laughable. It actually runs deeper than that: our concept of travel within a fantasy world is linked to the idea of combat. How we judge the merit of characters is based on how they face danger and death, not how well they play poker.
You could make a comedy RPG like that, perhaps. A dance-off RPG. But if you want a reasonably serious RPG (not necessarily dark, but not a straight comedy), you need to deal with this weakness.
As tempting as it is to swap out combat for, say, cooking, you can't do it. You have to rebuild your experience from the ground up. You have to start with cooking, then think about how to build the loops, how to build the experiences, how to build the interactions, how to portray the NPCs...
Let's design a Mass-Effect-like. A game which "feels like" Mass Effect, but has completely different core play.
Our noncombat Mass Effect is about making the horrifyingly complex systems of the science fiction future work. The party repairs, plans, retrofits, and extends infrastructure. They work for the Central Planning Office. We'll call our game CPO for the moment.
The core loop is dealing with specific problems. Rather than cement everything too early, let's just mention some categories of "enemies" you might face: damaged parts, missing parts, misconfigured systems, incompatible hardware, incompatible software, archaic software, daisy-chain failures, missing procedures, and annoying people.
Right away, I can see four basic categories: hardware wrangling, software wrangling, red tape, and people/groups. I can also see various kinds of challenges within those categories: something broke, something crashed, something's missing, something's misconfigured, two things are incompatible, something failed because something else failed (detective work), etc.
Can this be made interesting?
Well, mechanically, anything can be made interesting. The question is whether it can be presented in a meaty way. The big draw of combat is that everyone can feel it. Even if it's presented like an oldschool RPG where someone steps forward, moves slightly, and then steps back, you still understand that there's a monster getting whacked.
There are two things we need in order to make CPO's core loop interesting.
The first is a good presentation. I think this is quite possible. Watching large machines turn on, lights come back, vents start working on the clouds of smoke, water start spraying... these are actually pretty good. You can really feel a sense of accomplishment when you repair a broken thing. This can be further punched up if lives are at risk - genuinely at risk, not just some color text. If you do badly, people will get injured, die, become homeless, or otherwise suffer. Work fast!
The second thing we need is a flexible system. It's easy to make a puzzle game out of this kind of situation - you have a bunch of pieces and you need to arrange them. However, the strength of an RPG's combat system is that it is very flexible. A variety of team builds can take on a variety of challenges in a variety of ways. Even if something is sub-optimal, the team can pull through if you spend a few more resources.
So this isn't a puzzle. Instead, the compromised systems are like enemies to be pounded. You don't just replace a component of a damaged factory: you assault it with ongoing repair attempts. If you have suitable components, it's like having an elemental advantage and your assaults will be much faster/more effective. If software is incompatible, attack with with programming hacks until compatibility is established.
Moreover, in most cases there's cross-compatibility. If software is incompatible, replace hardware modules until you find one with compatible software. If hardware is missing, write software to rebalance outputs and route around the missing piece.
Although I like the realtime combat systems we see these days, it makes more sense for these actions to take many hours or even days. While the player can wander around in real time, the "combat" turns are much slower. This means the exploration loop is actually tighter than the combat loop, because you can explore a whole space station in far less than one turn of "combat".
This is obviously a bit of a concern. Normally you would have combat be the core loop and you would fall into it many times during the explore phase, each time executing a complete combat.
We require a bit of a different approach if we want to do it this "slow loop" way... and we definitely want to do it this way. Aside from combat, there are very few immersive activities that take less time than walking around. Figuring this out would let us build a huge variety of "inverted RPGs" where the core activity iterates more slowly than the support activities.
To make this work, we have to create offramps from combat into exploration, then from exploration back into combat.
Functionally, this means that as you explore a place, the details of the place change. This is obvious: you are changing the place with your repairs. Moreover, the people who live in the place (or the weather or whatever) are also changing over time as their condition progresses.
Exploring becomes less about discovering new terrain, and more about discovering and taking advantage of these changes. Did someone regain consciousness? If so, you can ask them how the vent systems work, and get an "extra attack" in your combat against it. Did one of your people score a "critical hit" on some incompatible software? If so, use partial compatibility to help fuel your assault on the reactor repairs.
Exploration is no longer exploration, it's "resource management" - finding new resources.
With that in mind, we can expand it. Resource management includes blunting or evading new resource drains. It includes deciding to spend resources in a new way (for example, giving a colonist expensive medical treatment if his condition worsens). It includes moving resources - bringing supplies to your NPC team mates, or switching out which shipboard reactor you're using so you can swap out the nuclear core...
In turn, we begin to see this double-loop emerging. There's a lot of resource management happening on the "fairly fast" level. Perhaps each "combat" turn takes four hours, and at the end of each turn you can choose to wander around if you like. The resources supporting you may change a bit, but the big issue is the very predictable ongoing consumption of resources. Power from a limited power bank. Oxygen from a limited life support system. Food from a limited cabinet. These are resources you will wrangle between turns - negotiating for more oxygen, switching to backup power, going on limited rations...
By changing how our resource management system works, we can completely change the feel of our game and get a really good heartbeat going.
For example, we have a bank of 3D printers to print hardware components for us. Hardware work is therefore limited by the max output of these printers. However, you can also "prep". A turn (4 hours) spent prepping will add output to the total, allowing you to stockpile parts for really big job. These parts cannot be kept: they are special-purpose. So most of the time, you'll be working within the constraints of the printers, but it's flexible if you have time and good planning skills.
Hackers will want to combine their efforts with that of the shipboard computer. But that's a limited resource. Programmers only require a computer assist when using an advanced move, such as password cracking or database filtering. Rather than being a specific cap amount that is available, using the computers aboard the ship takes electricity - and not on a linear progression. Getting 10 points of computation is much more than 10x as expensive as getting 1 point.
Of course, electricity is obviously also a component. You have two shipside reactors, but the power output isn't fantastic and you need to keep swapping out fission cores, which takes a turn (4 hours). It's obviously nice if you can pull power from the facility you're repairing - colony reactors are much more powerful. But if the problem is that the colony's power is not working right, well!
But maybe the colony has computers, or 3D printers. Maybe the colony has batteries that you can charge up.
You can see - we can mix the resources you bring with the resources available on site. And they change in predictable ways turn to turn, so you can optimize your efforts.
It's beginning to sound like a fun game to me. You land at a dark space station, go aboard with suits. One party member spends every turn ferrying oxygen to the others, while they struggle to repair the power systems. One is elbow-deep in the reactor, the other is underneath the main breaker, swapping out conduits. The power system comes up, and you watch their faces look up as the lights shudder to life. They high-five.
The station is full of smoke, which causes the newly-resurrected life support to seize up. You use the station power to hack the central database of users, so you can program a new "smoke compatible" life support mode - one turn per action.
Twelve hours have passed, and you can finally take off your life support suits. You're all pretty tired from your twelve-hour shift, so maybe it's time to sleep. Some other party members from your ship step in to keep working while your "A" team sleeps.
They discover some colonists in cryo pods...
That is the basic format: turn-to-turn resource management combined with extended activities. You don't even need a hard party number cap, because party members use resources. It's self-balancing.
In current RPGs, resource management is long-term. You horde potions and mana and health over the course of a dungeon. We've inverted that: the resources are short-term. Each turn is a question of how to arrange them, how to refill them, how to spend them.
The way the two loops relate has been changed. Previously, the combat loop only had one "off ramp" - combat ends, you go back to exploring.
But our combat loop is slowed way down. Our players will take too much time to loop through until completion.
So we have to offer many off ramps. Combat doesn't "end" in exploration. You shuttle back and forth between the two.
The connection between the loops is much tighter, which should make the game quite immersive.
And that's the start of my design.
Now I'm going to combine the two and talk about a noncombat RPG.
There are few "noncombat RPGs". They are never very good, because the entire idea of an RPG is based around combat.
Sure, all the gameplay loops orbit the concept of combat. Even above that, the way we consider fantasy worlds is through the lens of combat.
For example, I can simply swap combat out with something that is almost mechanically identical. Poker, for example. But the RPG will still end up bad, because the concept of poker players saving the universe is laughable. It actually runs deeper than that: our concept of travel within a fantasy world is linked to the idea of combat. How we judge the merit of characters is based on how they face danger and death, not how well they play poker.
You could make a comedy RPG like that, perhaps. A dance-off RPG. But if you want a reasonably serious RPG (not necessarily dark, but not a straight comedy), you need to deal with this weakness.
As tempting as it is to swap out combat for, say, cooking, you can't do it. You have to rebuild your experience from the ground up. You have to start with cooking, then think about how to build the loops, how to build the experiences, how to build the interactions, how to portray the NPCs...
Let's design a Mass-Effect-like. A game which "feels like" Mass Effect, but has completely different core play.
Our noncombat Mass Effect is about making the horrifyingly complex systems of the science fiction future work. The party repairs, plans, retrofits, and extends infrastructure. They work for the Central Planning Office. We'll call our game CPO for the moment.
The core loop is dealing with specific problems. Rather than cement everything too early, let's just mention some categories of "enemies" you might face: damaged parts, missing parts, misconfigured systems, incompatible hardware, incompatible software, archaic software, daisy-chain failures, missing procedures, and annoying people.
Right away, I can see four basic categories: hardware wrangling, software wrangling, red tape, and people/groups. I can also see various kinds of challenges within those categories: something broke, something crashed, something's missing, something's misconfigured, two things are incompatible, something failed because something else failed (detective work), etc.
Can this be made interesting?
Well, mechanically, anything can be made interesting. The question is whether it can be presented in a meaty way. The big draw of combat is that everyone can feel it. Even if it's presented like an oldschool RPG where someone steps forward, moves slightly, and then steps back, you still understand that there's a monster getting whacked.
There are two things we need in order to make CPO's core loop interesting.
The first is a good presentation. I think this is quite possible. Watching large machines turn on, lights come back, vents start working on the clouds of smoke, water start spraying... these are actually pretty good. You can really feel a sense of accomplishment when you repair a broken thing. This can be further punched up if lives are at risk - genuinely at risk, not just some color text. If you do badly, people will get injured, die, become homeless, or otherwise suffer. Work fast!
The second thing we need is a flexible system. It's easy to make a puzzle game out of this kind of situation - you have a bunch of pieces and you need to arrange them. However, the strength of an RPG's combat system is that it is very flexible. A variety of team builds can take on a variety of challenges in a variety of ways. Even if something is sub-optimal, the team can pull through if you spend a few more resources.
So this isn't a puzzle. Instead, the compromised systems are like enemies to be pounded. You don't just replace a component of a damaged factory: you assault it with ongoing repair attempts. If you have suitable components, it's like having an elemental advantage and your assaults will be much faster/more effective. If software is incompatible, attack with with programming hacks until compatibility is established.
Moreover, in most cases there's cross-compatibility. If software is incompatible, replace hardware modules until you find one with compatible software. If hardware is missing, write software to rebalance outputs and route around the missing piece.
Although I like the realtime combat systems we see these days, it makes more sense for these actions to take many hours or even days. While the player can wander around in real time, the "combat" turns are much slower. This means the exploration loop is actually tighter than the combat loop, because you can explore a whole space station in far less than one turn of "combat".
This is obviously a bit of a concern. Normally you would have combat be the core loop and you would fall into it many times during the explore phase, each time executing a complete combat.
We require a bit of a different approach if we want to do it this "slow loop" way... and we definitely want to do it this way. Aside from combat, there are very few immersive activities that take less time than walking around. Figuring this out would let us build a huge variety of "inverted RPGs" where the core activity iterates more slowly than the support activities.
To make this work, we have to create offramps from combat into exploration, then from exploration back into combat.
Functionally, this means that as you explore a place, the details of the place change. This is obvious: you are changing the place with your repairs. Moreover, the people who live in the place (or the weather or whatever) are also changing over time as their condition progresses.
Exploring becomes less about discovering new terrain, and more about discovering and taking advantage of these changes. Did someone regain consciousness? If so, you can ask them how the vent systems work, and get an "extra attack" in your combat against it. Did one of your people score a "critical hit" on some incompatible software? If so, use partial compatibility to help fuel your assault on the reactor repairs.
Exploration is no longer exploration, it's "resource management" - finding new resources.
With that in mind, we can expand it. Resource management includes blunting or evading new resource drains. It includes deciding to spend resources in a new way (for example, giving a colonist expensive medical treatment if his condition worsens). It includes moving resources - bringing supplies to your NPC team mates, or switching out which shipboard reactor you're using so you can swap out the nuclear core...
In turn, we begin to see this double-loop emerging. There's a lot of resource management happening on the "fairly fast" level. Perhaps each "combat" turn takes four hours, and at the end of each turn you can choose to wander around if you like. The resources supporting you may change a bit, but the big issue is the very predictable ongoing consumption of resources. Power from a limited power bank. Oxygen from a limited life support system. Food from a limited cabinet. These are resources you will wrangle between turns - negotiating for more oxygen, switching to backup power, going on limited rations...
By changing how our resource management system works, we can completely change the feel of our game and get a really good heartbeat going.
For example, we have a bank of 3D printers to print hardware components for us. Hardware work is therefore limited by the max output of these printers. However, you can also "prep". A turn (4 hours) spent prepping will add output to the total, allowing you to stockpile parts for really big job. These parts cannot be kept: they are special-purpose. So most of the time, you'll be working within the constraints of the printers, but it's flexible if you have time and good planning skills.
Hackers will want to combine their efforts with that of the shipboard computer. But that's a limited resource. Programmers only require a computer assist when using an advanced move, such as password cracking or database filtering. Rather than being a specific cap amount that is available, using the computers aboard the ship takes electricity - and not on a linear progression. Getting 10 points of computation is much more than 10x as expensive as getting 1 point.
Of course, electricity is obviously also a component. You have two shipside reactors, but the power output isn't fantastic and you need to keep swapping out fission cores, which takes a turn (4 hours). It's obviously nice if you can pull power from the facility you're repairing - colony reactors are much more powerful. But if the problem is that the colony's power is not working right, well!
But maybe the colony has computers, or 3D printers. Maybe the colony has batteries that you can charge up.
You can see - we can mix the resources you bring with the resources available on site. And they change in predictable ways turn to turn, so you can optimize your efforts.
It's beginning to sound like a fun game to me. You land at a dark space station, go aboard with suits. One party member spends every turn ferrying oxygen to the others, while they struggle to repair the power systems. One is elbow-deep in the reactor, the other is underneath the main breaker, swapping out conduits. The power system comes up, and you watch their faces look up as the lights shudder to life. They high-five.
The station is full of smoke, which causes the newly-resurrected life support to seize up. You use the station power to hack the central database of users, so you can program a new "smoke compatible" life support mode - one turn per action.
Twelve hours have passed, and you can finally take off your life support suits. You're all pretty tired from your twelve-hour shift, so maybe it's time to sleep. Some other party members from your ship step in to keep working while your "A" team sleeps.
They discover some colonists in cryo pods...
That is the basic format: turn-to-turn resource management combined with extended activities. You don't even need a hard party number cap, because party members use resources. It's self-balancing.
In current RPGs, resource management is long-term. You horde potions and mana and health over the course of a dungeon. We've inverted that: the resources are short-term. Each turn is a question of how to arrange them, how to refill them, how to spend them.
The way the two loops relate has been changed. Previously, the combat loop only had one "off ramp" - combat ends, you go back to exploring.
But our combat loop is slowed way down. Our players will take too much time to loop through until completion.
So we have to offer many off ramps. Combat doesn't "end" in exploration. You shuttle back and forth between the two.
The connection between the loops is much tighter, which should make the game quite immersive.
And that's the start of my design.
Dissecting the RPG
One of my big interests is RPGs such as Mass Effect, Dragon's Dogma, etc. But these days, I find that the gameplay is seriously getting in the way of the experience - for example, Dragon Age is poisoned by its slavish adherence to standard RPG gameplay and progression.
When I break down what I like about various RPGs, it resolves into two things.
I've done a lot of work trying to figure out how to get that same feeling "on the cheap", and I've discovered that there are very specific systems you need to implement. Obviously, you need all four loops. You can actually use as many variants as you want. Most RPGs have three exploration systems: dungeon, overworld, and city. Most also have several kinds of optimization - gear, leveling, skill/spell, item use. Dragon's Dogma, known for its particularly tasty combat, has three kinds of combat situations: free-for-all, anti-titan, and magic. They are actually very different - not different roles within the combat engine, but fundamentally different kinds of combat.
That's not enough.
I've made loads of prototypes with those constraints, but they didn't keep me in the groove. It turns out, what you need is hooks between them. You can't just drop the player from one to the other without warning, and you can't totally rely on the player to switch loops when they get a bit bored. Instead, what you do is set up a world where you are more likely to switch loops (or want to switch loops) if you do a specific kind of thing in this loop.
For example, if you're exploring a dark cave, that's exploration-loop. As you peek around a corner and see a crowd of cave spiders, you know that the combat play is not far away. You can choose to engage combat - and normally you will. But you can also prep, sneak around, back away, choose a first strike, try to pull just a few...
Even in a game like FF6, with random encounters, you would plan your explorations based around the number of steps you were taking. You headed for a tough boss? Don't waste a step. You trying to level? Wander around the entrance, run home when you run out of magic. And everything inbetween. While the encounters were random, the pattern of encounters was not.
Basically, the player can switch loops, but it's only at off-ramps. It's not just that one loop changes the stats in another: it's that when and how you set up your loop changes is gameplay. Perhaps the most important gameplay.
I like Mass Effect because I like hanging out with the team. Dragon Age has some of the dullest gameplay and character design around, but I like it because the characters are all very interactive.
There's a combination of elements. One is that the NPCs are quite distinct, and feel distinct all of the time. In Skyrim, you can get NPCs to follow you around, but they don't have any significant personality. In Mass Effect, every NPC feels very distinct: distinct personalities, distinct visual designs, distinct voicework, and distinct combat roles. You never forget who you have in your team. You never mistake racist human lady for psychic human lady - they feel completely distinct.
Another element that makes me care is that the NPCs have social interactions - with you and with each other. They are not only distinct, they also exist within the world. Classically this has been backstory exposition, but I think that's an unnecessary holdover. I think social interactions and judgments are far more efficient and effective: Mordin's singing makes more of an impression on the player than his history with krogan genetics.
Social interactions are largely unexplored. At the moment, the three types we have are backstory exposition, random chatter, and loyalty/romance quests. I think there's a lot of room to add in more kinds of social interaction, but it needs a light touch. This is not core gameplay.
The last element that makes me care is the feeling that I can shape them, and perhaps that they can shape me. The most obvious example of this is leveling and gear selection - changing how they fight. But there is a lot more potential.
Part of it is the potential of the character. The path you choose locks away a path you did not take, and just knowing that other path existed makes it clear you've affected their life.
In Old Republic, nearly every character has a very distinct light side and dark side path. I can't play dark side, it's just too badly written, but just knowing that there was a dark side path made me feel that their light side path had more weight. The characters felt more important to me because their lives were changed because of me. Not "oh, the HERO changed their life", but "oh, the PLAYER changed their life."
These big forks are probably not necessary. I think small things are probably more important than big things, although we haven't really gotten that far. Let me give an example:
In Mass Effect, nearly every character is a potential romance target. But once you have chosen a lover, nothing really changes.
Imagine if once you chose a lover, they would ask you to be a bit different. For example, they might steadily redecorate your quarters. They might ask you to wear the NC-7 helmet because it looks soooo good. They might be more upfront about asking you to take specific side missions, or give you optional objectives that are substantially harder. All based on their personality.
For example, you go to explore a new world and Tali might ask you to avoid getting shot: if you get shot, she has to acclimatize to that planet's bacteria. Garrus might ask you to wear specific armor he likes. Liara might ask that you not make anyone angry in conversation, because it gives her an empathic headache. Doing or not doing these things would have no real statistical effect: this is to make hanging out more interesting, not to give you statistical perks.
If all of the NPCs made these kinds of requests, it'd be annoying to try to play the game. However, at this point you've shown that you like a specific NPC enough to spend your fictional lives together. That's permission to be a bit more aggressive with their personality and interests.
Notice, none of these are "loyalty missions". They're not linked to the core plot progression. They just make hanging out a little more interesting.
Anyway, there are a lot of options on how to make NPCs more interesting using these kinds of ideas.
I needed to write this essay before I could write an essay on redesigning the open-world RPG, so that's this essay done. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it.
When I break down what I like about various RPGs, it resolves into two things.
Pacing
First, I really do like the pacing of RPGs, especially with the modern realtime combat systems found in every big-budget game since Oblivion. There's a really powerful pull to this combination of exploration, combat, looting, and optimizing.I've done a lot of work trying to figure out how to get that same feeling "on the cheap", and I've discovered that there are very specific systems you need to implement. Obviously, you need all four loops. You can actually use as many variants as you want. Most RPGs have three exploration systems: dungeon, overworld, and city. Most also have several kinds of optimization - gear, leveling, skill/spell, item use. Dragon's Dogma, known for its particularly tasty combat, has three kinds of combat situations: free-for-all, anti-titan, and magic. They are actually very different - not different roles within the combat engine, but fundamentally different kinds of combat.
That's not enough.
I've made loads of prototypes with those constraints, but they didn't keep me in the groove. It turns out, what you need is hooks between them. You can't just drop the player from one to the other without warning, and you can't totally rely on the player to switch loops when they get a bit bored. Instead, what you do is set up a world where you are more likely to switch loops (or want to switch loops) if you do a specific kind of thing in this loop.
For example, if you're exploring a dark cave, that's exploration-loop. As you peek around a corner and see a crowd of cave spiders, you know that the combat play is not far away. You can choose to engage combat - and normally you will. But you can also prep, sneak around, back away, choose a first strike, try to pull just a few...
Even in a game like FF6, with random encounters, you would plan your explorations based around the number of steps you were taking. You headed for a tough boss? Don't waste a step. You trying to level? Wander around the entrance, run home when you run out of magic. And everything inbetween. While the encounters were random, the pattern of encounters was not.
Basically, the player can switch loops, but it's only at off-ramps. It's not just that one loop changes the stats in another: it's that when and how you set up your loop changes is gameplay. Perhaps the most important gameplay.
Characters
Well, Rogue has that same gameplay, and that's the reason it's got such longevity. But I like Mass Effect better than Rogue. I enjoy RPGs where you have party members. The more personality they have and the more interactive they are, the more I like the game.I like Mass Effect because I like hanging out with the team. Dragon Age has some of the dullest gameplay and character design around, but I like it because the characters are all very interactive.
There's a combination of elements. One is that the NPCs are quite distinct, and feel distinct all of the time. In Skyrim, you can get NPCs to follow you around, but they don't have any significant personality. In Mass Effect, every NPC feels very distinct: distinct personalities, distinct visual designs, distinct voicework, and distinct combat roles. You never forget who you have in your team. You never mistake racist human lady for psychic human lady - they feel completely distinct.
Another element that makes me care is that the NPCs have social interactions - with you and with each other. They are not only distinct, they also exist within the world. Classically this has been backstory exposition, but I think that's an unnecessary holdover. I think social interactions and judgments are far more efficient and effective: Mordin's singing makes more of an impression on the player than his history with krogan genetics.
Social interactions are largely unexplored. At the moment, the three types we have are backstory exposition, random chatter, and loyalty/romance quests. I think there's a lot of room to add in more kinds of social interaction, but it needs a light touch. This is not core gameplay.
The last element that makes me care is the feeling that I can shape them, and perhaps that they can shape me. The most obvious example of this is leveling and gear selection - changing how they fight. But there is a lot more potential.
Part of it is the potential of the character. The path you choose locks away a path you did not take, and just knowing that other path existed makes it clear you've affected their life.
In Old Republic, nearly every character has a very distinct light side and dark side path. I can't play dark side, it's just too badly written, but just knowing that there was a dark side path made me feel that their light side path had more weight. The characters felt more important to me because their lives were changed because of me. Not "oh, the HERO changed their life", but "oh, the PLAYER changed their life."
These big forks are probably not necessary. I think small things are probably more important than big things, although we haven't really gotten that far. Let me give an example:
In Mass Effect, nearly every character is a potential romance target. But once you have chosen a lover, nothing really changes.
Imagine if once you chose a lover, they would ask you to be a bit different. For example, they might steadily redecorate your quarters. They might ask you to wear the NC-7 helmet because it looks soooo good. They might be more upfront about asking you to take specific side missions, or give you optional objectives that are substantially harder. All based on their personality.
For example, you go to explore a new world and Tali might ask you to avoid getting shot: if you get shot, she has to acclimatize to that planet's bacteria. Garrus might ask you to wear specific armor he likes. Liara might ask that you not make anyone angry in conversation, because it gives her an empathic headache. Doing or not doing these things would have no real statistical effect: this is to make hanging out more interesting, not to give you statistical perks.
If all of the NPCs made these kinds of requests, it'd be annoying to try to play the game. However, at this point you've shown that you like a specific NPC enough to spend your fictional lives together. That's permission to be a bit more aggressive with their personality and interests.
Notice, none of these are "loyalty missions". They're not linked to the core plot progression. They just make hanging out a little more interesting.
Anyway, there are a lot of options on how to make NPCs more interesting using these kinds of ideas.
I needed to write this essay before I could write an essay on redesigning the open-world RPG, so that's this essay done. Hopefully you enjoyed reading it.
Tuesday, October 14, 2014
Boring Play
Recently I've been in a bit of a war with myself about game design.
I create a lot of prototypes - typically at least one a week. For a long time, they were mostly about exploring some gameplay idea - a particular tweak on poker rules, or a feel for the timing in a brawler.
As time passed, I became steadily more interested in themes. Pick a theme, then craft the rules out of the giant backlog of gameplay I explored. Fit them together.
In the end, there are only a few kinds of play that are considered "valid". If I come up with a theme such as "fluffy bunnies in the woods", it'll have to rely on the same challenges that every other game relies on.
Movement and timing. Pattern recognition/optimization. Choosing the right option out of an ever-changing crowd of options. Luck.
There are some games that people barely consider games. For example, Gone Home.
But Gone Home still uses these mechanics. You move around the house looking for things to click on. You put together the pattern of the story in your head. The least gamey game is still reliant on the same challenges as the most gamey game, just with very different pacing.
What about Animal Crossing and similar games?
Well, there's a lot of pattern recognition and optimization in Animal Crossing - gathering valuable things, hitting the parts of the town you need to hit, tending your crops, finding jobs and sidequests. Those are all pattern recognition and optimization.
There are some things peeking from the shadows, though. Creating your character involves picking from a list of options, but unlike an RPG battle or math-teaching game, none of the choices is right or wrong. Similarly, in Gone Home the challenges are all about movement and clicking just like in a shooty game, but none of the movement or clicks could really be considered "bad". You can't lose at Gone Home - the challenges just serve to to indicate which way is forward so you can control your own experience a bit more clearly.
In both cases, the "challenge" (picking an option, moving and looking) is there to allow the player to control their own experience. In both cases, the game tells you how to move forward specifically so you can linger or move on as your preferences and mood dictate.
OK, with that in mind, let's back up a little bit.
---
Gameplay is really boring.
Oh, it can keep your mind entrained. I play Kerbal and Skyrim and so on. The mechanics keep me thinking, keep me looking towards the next step.
But when I look at it, there's nothing to the mechanics at all. My outlook on life wouldn't be any different if I couldn't choose the right amount of fuel and thrust to land on a fake moon, or level up my sneak enough to stab a fake skeleton with a fake knife.
There is some value in these games, though.
Through Kerbal I learned a lot about the mechanics of space flight. While the lessons are stilted and simplified, they further my interest in and my understanding of real science, real space flight. By giving me a cartoonish version of something real, the game lets me hold it in my hands, twist it, hold it up to the light, and start to understand.
Skyrim is not so positive. The cartoonish thing Skyrim lets me hold is the culture that formed it. It's a very manly-man Tolkien fantasy with a lot of serious issues. But it serves: when I hold Skyrim in my hand and start gluing other people's pieces onto it, I can see all the weaknesses in that culture, and explore my steadily-increasing distance from it.
Even if you don't read into it as much as I do, Skyrim's strength is the setting, not the mechanics. High-fidelity fantasy world you can wander around in? That's what you'll remember about Skyrim. You won't fondly remember the lockpicking puzzle.
So, why do we do it?
Why do we slap useless gameplay into these things?
1) Pacing. By keeping the mind engaged, players can remain interested in the world even when their preferences aren't lining up and they aren't interested in the bit of setting they're currently looking at.
2) Engagement. By allowing players to choose how they approach the game, we also change how they approach the setpieces. This helps players grip the concepts in the world and hold them up to the light.
3) Synchronization. By giving all players the same emergent tools, we allow every player to have their own unique experiences with the same foundation. Sharing those experiences with other players (or themselves in the past), we allow players to have conversations about the concepts in the game. Even if it's just bragging about headshot counts.
Thinking about gameplay from this perspective is very freeing.
Instead of thinking "what kind of gameplay do I want in this game?" maybe we should think -
1) How do I pace the game so that the player remains interested even when their mood drifts out of synch with the setting?
2) How do I let the player explore the ramifications of change in this world?
3) What commonalities do I rely on to help players understand each other's experiences and choices?
...
I haven't gotten any further than that, yet.
I create a lot of prototypes - typically at least one a week. For a long time, they were mostly about exploring some gameplay idea - a particular tweak on poker rules, or a feel for the timing in a brawler.
As time passed, I became steadily more interested in themes. Pick a theme, then craft the rules out of the giant backlog of gameplay I explored. Fit them together.
In the end, there are only a few kinds of play that are considered "valid". If I come up with a theme such as "fluffy bunnies in the woods", it'll have to rely on the same challenges that every other game relies on.
Movement and timing. Pattern recognition/optimization. Choosing the right option out of an ever-changing crowd of options. Luck.
There are some games that people barely consider games. For example, Gone Home.
But Gone Home still uses these mechanics. You move around the house looking for things to click on. You put together the pattern of the story in your head. The least gamey game is still reliant on the same challenges as the most gamey game, just with very different pacing.
What about Animal Crossing and similar games?
Well, there's a lot of pattern recognition and optimization in Animal Crossing - gathering valuable things, hitting the parts of the town you need to hit, tending your crops, finding jobs and sidequests. Those are all pattern recognition and optimization.
There are some things peeking from the shadows, though. Creating your character involves picking from a list of options, but unlike an RPG battle or math-teaching game, none of the choices is right or wrong. Similarly, in Gone Home the challenges are all about movement and clicking just like in a shooty game, but none of the movement or clicks could really be considered "bad". You can't lose at Gone Home - the challenges just serve to to indicate which way is forward so you can control your own experience a bit more clearly.
In both cases, the "challenge" (picking an option, moving and looking) is there to allow the player to control their own experience. In both cases, the game tells you how to move forward specifically so you can linger or move on as your preferences and mood dictate.
OK, with that in mind, let's back up a little bit.
---
Gameplay is really boring.
Oh, it can keep your mind entrained. I play Kerbal and Skyrim and so on. The mechanics keep me thinking, keep me looking towards the next step.
But when I look at it, there's nothing to the mechanics at all. My outlook on life wouldn't be any different if I couldn't choose the right amount of fuel and thrust to land on a fake moon, or level up my sneak enough to stab a fake skeleton with a fake knife.
There is some value in these games, though.
Through Kerbal I learned a lot about the mechanics of space flight. While the lessons are stilted and simplified, they further my interest in and my understanding of real science, real space flight. By giving me a cartoonish version of something real, the game lets me hold it in my hands, twist it, hold it up to the light, and start to understand.
Skyrim is not so positive. The cartoonish thing Skyrim lets me hold is the culture that formed it. It's a very manly-man Tolkien fantasy with a lot of serious issues. But it serves: when I hold Skyrim in my hand and start gluing other people's pieces onto it, I can see all the weaknesses in that culture, and explore my steadily-increasing distance from it.
Even if you don't read into it as much as I do, Skyrim's strength is the setting, not the mechanics. High-fidelity fantasy world you can wander around in? That's what you'll remember about Skyrim. You won't fondly remember the lockpicking puzzle.
So, why do we do it?
Why do we slap useless gameplay into these things?
1) Pacing. By keeping the mind engaged, players can remain interested in the world even when their preferences aren't lining up and they aren't interested in the bit of setting they're currently looking at.
2) Engagement. By allowing players to choose how they approach the game, we also change how they approach the setpieces. This helps players grip the concepts in the world and hold them up to the light.
3) Synchronization. By giving all players the same emergent tools, we allow every player to have their own unique experiences with the same foundation. Sharing those experiences with other players (or themselves in the past), we allow players to have conversations about the concepts in the game. Even if it's just bragging about headshot counts.
Thinking about gameplay from this perspective is very freeing.
Instead of thinking "what kind of gameplay do I want in this game?" maybe we should think -
1) How do I pace the game so that the player remains interested even when their mood drifts out of synch with the setting?
2) How do I let the player explore the ramifications of change in this world?
3) What commonalities do I rely on to help players understand each other's experiences and choices?
...
I haven't gotten any further than that, yet.
Friday, October 10, 2014
Mechanics as Self-Expression
For the past week I've alternated between talking about mods and talking about collaborative content, but today I'd like to combine the two.
One of the things I like about Kerbal is that everyone has such different priorities, and installs a completely different set of mods. I think most moddable games are like this, but in Kerbal it's really really clear because the majority of mods are visible the majority of the time.
In the end, every high-level Kerbal player has very strong opinions on which mods are the most fun. In turn they have a game that plays completely differently, with very different mission objectives or methods.
Then I started to think about collaboration.
Most of the time, when I think of collaboration I think of players expressing themselves artistically.
When I think of mechanics, I think of cooperation. People working together to get a good statistical result. But that's not really the kind of collaboration I'm talking about, because it's normally just players trying to implement an ideal solution, not players expressing themselves.
But if we make the mechanics of the game part of their self-expression, that suddenly changes.
Previously, creating something in the game world was mostly about either expressing yourself OR accomplishing objectives. But if the players can choose the mechanics they include, now creating things is both at the same time, because your mechanical options are a result of your self-expression.
Collaborations can arise within this space. For example, in a fictional version of Kerbal, one player has the faster-than-light mod installed, and another has the karbonite resource-mining mod installed.
The two players can collaborate. Use FTL ships to move mined materials between distant planets. Restock your long-range transports at colonies that produce life support resources.
If the mods are created with the intent to help collaborate with people who aren't using the mods, there would also be additional parts. Set up an FTL beacon so ships without FTL-mod drives can travel faster than light. Set up an automatic waystation that can hurl goods into space without needing direct docking or control, to allow the other player to get resources from you even if your mods are incompatible...
Even in a game with no mods, this sort of collaboration is possible. However, it requires a certain approach.
Let's consider a tabletop RPG.
The issue with this kind of collaboration is that it requires the creation of long-term content. Classically, most of the collaboration in a tabletop game comes from social collaboration - telling stories together, acting out something together, choosing a path together. These don't require a long-term record of your choices, although you can certainly have one.
But with mechanical collaboration, I can't see any way aside from using a long-term record.
With that in mind, this is a tabletop RPG where the players do a lot of creating. You actually create a lot in every tabletop RPG - your avatar is a bundle of creative choices. However, you rarely collaborate with others regarding the specifics of your character sheet. Instead, it makes more sense to move those choices somewhere more convenient and shareable.
My thought is that the game could be about makers of some kind. Perhaps it's about mecha, or pokemon, or it's a hacker game, or maybe it takes place in dreams, or it's a Harry Potter game where you get to invent spells and enchantments...
The "classes" wouldn't be about the role these people play in combat. Instead, you would choose a few classes, and each class would contain an entirely different kind of infrastructure you would build with.
For example, if it was a Harry Potterlike, you might choose "potions". This would allow you to brew up potions, which in turn means you'll need to keep a stock of various potions. But you don't choose potions alone: you also have another class. Say, "botany", the study of plants. These get along well together, since plants provide many ingredients for potions... and there are potions that enhance plants. So as you build up your infrastructure for each class, you get synergy and they build each other up.
Potions and botany seem like they go particularly well together due to the fact that plants make good ingredients, but there's nothing mechanically linking them aside from the output of one going into the input of another. Which means that the two don't actually mix very well and aren't very interesting to combine. You have a garden, you have an alchemy lab, and never the twain shall meet.
To fix that, we use a "Kerbalish" system, where all our classes invest in shared infrastructure. In this case, you are allowed a certain amount of space in an environment of your choice. Like a Kerbal rocket launch, you design your rocket around all your mods. So our space would naturally try to combine botany and alchemy in one space when possible.
Each comes seeded with concepts that can help the other. The tools you would use for the extensive and prolonged brewing processes are also valuable in gardening: drip-feeding plants, hydroponics, delivering magical fertilizer, and so on. Gardening concepts are valuable in your alchemy lab: leeching from still-growing plants, using gentle sunlight, soil-filtered modules, fermentation, mold - all of these can be used in an alchemical setup. And, in any given setup, it might be difficult to see where one kind of lab ends and another begins.
It's not that botany and alchemy have a particularly deep bond, either. All the classes support each other in this way, and most players will choose, say, three.
The key to this is that the player has to build medium-duration constructs as part of their play. The player doesn't get a mortar and pestle and mix up whatever potion she needs today. Instead, if she wants to brew healing potions, she'll make that a dedicated part of her next setup. If she wants to grow pixieleaf, she'll have part of her next setup dedicated to that. And then, a month later, she'll get another chance to build something. And, during that month, who knows what resources she'll find on her adventures to help her build her next setup?
This seems quite complex, dumping all this interactive machinery on the players, but it is a gentle learning curve. When you start, it's all very basic space management - how much stuff can you fit on a tabletop, a windowsill?
Complications are gradually introduced in the same way as any RPG.
The whole thing needs to synergizes with the adventure phase. There needs to be a nice resonance. To that end, the adventures have to be carefully constructed to allow you to benefit from your setups, and also to gain new resources/information that will help you in your following setups.
We also have to allow players to collaborate with each other. That's pretty easy, it's just a matter of how far we want to take it. The more freely players can add to each other's setups, the more each class needs to diverge as you level up.
If only you can add alchemical stuff to your garden, then the alchemy class can be pretty linear. But if anyone with the alchemy class can add stuff to your garden, then each person needs their own, very different concept of how alchemy should work. Otherwise there's no advantage to having multiple alchemists.
Well, anyway, that's just a quick example, half of a Harry-Potterlike. You can do the same kind of thing with any setting. Just make sure that the classes build with each other on a shared framework, and resonate well with the more active play sections.
There are also other options, such as having these things be part of the active play session... I've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities here.
One of the things I like about Kerbal is that everyone has such different priorities, and installs a completely different set of mods. I think most moddable games are like this, but in Kerbal it's really really clear because the majority of mods are visible the majority of the time.
In the end, every high-level Kerbal player has very strong opinions on which mods are the most fun. In turn they have a game that plays completely differently, with very different mission objectives or methods.
Then I started to think about collaboration.
Most of the time, when I think of collaboration I think of players expressing themselves artistically.
When I think of mechanics, I think of cooperation. People working together to get a good statistical result. But that's not really the kind of collaboration I'm talking about, because it's normally just players trying to implement an ideal solution, not players expressing themselves.
But if we make the mechanics of the game part of their self-expression, that suddenly changes.
Previously, creating something in the game world was mostly about either expressing yourself OR accomplishing objectives. But if the players can choose the mechanics they include, now creating things is both at the same time, because your mechanical options are a result of your self-expression.
Collaborations can arise within this space. For example, in a fictional version of Kerbal, one player has the faster-than-light mod installed, and another has the karbonite resource-mining mod installed.
The two players can collaborate. Use FTL ships to move mined materials between distant planets. Restock your long-range transports at colonies that produce life support resources.
If the mods are created with the intent to help collaborate with people who aren't using the mods, there would also be additional parts. Set up an FTL beacon so ships without FTL-mod drives can travel faster than light. Set up an automatic waystation that can hurl goods into space without needing direct docking or control, to allow the other player to get resources from you even if your mods are incompatible...
Even in a game with no mods, this sort of collaboration is possible. However, it requires a certain approach.
Let's consider a tabletop RPG.
The issue with this kind of collaboration is that it requires the creation of long-term content. Classically, most of the collaboration in a tabletop game comes from social collaboration - telling stories together, acting out something together, choosing a path together. These don't require a long-term record of your choices, although you can certainly have one.
But with mechanical collaboration, I can't see any way aside from using a long-term record.
With that in mind, this is a tabletop RPG where the players do a lot of creating. You actually create a lot in every tabletop RPG - your avatar is a bundle of creative choices. However, you rarely collaborate with others regarding the specifics of your character sheet. Instead, it makes more sense to move those choices somewhere more convenient and shareable.
My thought is that the game could be about makers of some kind. Perhaps it's about mecha, or pokemon, or it's a hacker game, or maybe it takes place in dreams, or it's a Harry Potter game where you get to invent spells and enchantments...
The "classes" wouldn't be about the role these people play in combat. Instead, you would choose a few classes, and each class would contain an entirely different kind of infrastructure you would build with.
For example, if it was a Harry Potterlike, you might choose "potions". This would allow you to brew up potions, which in turn means you'll need to keep a stock of various potions. But you don't choose potions alone: you also have another class. Say, "botany", the study of plants. These get along well together, since plants provide many ingredients for potions... and there are potions that enhance plants. So as you build up your infrastructure for each class, you get synergy and they build each other up.
Potions and botany seem like they go particularly well together due to the fact that plants make good ingredients, but there's nothing mechanically linking them aside from the output of one going into the input of another. Which means that the two don't actually mix very well and aren't very interesting to combine. You have a garden, you have an alchemy lab, and never the twain shall meet.
To fix that, we use a "Kerbalish" system, where all our classes invest in shared infrastructure. In this case, you are allowed a certain amount of space in an environment of your choice. Like a Kerbal rocket launch, you design your rocket around all your mods. So our space would naturally try to combine botany and alchemy in one space when possible.
Each comes seeded with concepts that can help the other. The tools you would use for the extensive and prolonged brewing processes are also valuable in gardening: drip-feeding plants, hydroponics, delivering magical fertilizer, and so on. Gardening concepts are valuable in your alchemy lab: leeching from still-growing plants, using gentle sunlight, soil-filtered modules, fermentation, mold - all of these can be used in an alchemical setup. And, in any given setup, it might be difficult to see where one kind of lab ends and another begins.
It's not that botany and alchemy have a particularly deep bond, either. All the classes support each other in this way, and most players will choose, say, three.
The key to this is that the player has to build medium-duration constructs as part of their play. The player doesn't get a mortar and pestle and mix up whatever potion she needs today. Instead, if she wants to brew healing potions, she'll make that a dedicated part of her next setup. If she wants to grow pixieleaf, she'll have part of her next setup dedicated to that. And then, a month later, she'll get another chance to build something. And, during that month, who knows what resources she'll find on her adventures to help her build her next setup?
This seems quite complex, dumping all this interactive machinery on the players, but it is a gentle learning curve. When you start, it's all very basic space management - how much stuff can you fit on a tabletop, a windowsill?
Complications are gradually introduced in the same way as any RPG.
The whole thing needs to synergizes with the adventure phase. There needs to be a nice resonance. To that end, the adventures have to be carefully constructed to allow you to benefit from your setups, and also to gain new resources/information that will help you in your following setups.
We also have to allow players to collaborate with each other. That's pretty easy, it's just a matter of how far we want to take it. The more freely players can add to each other's setups, the more each class needs to diverge as you level up.
If only you can add alchemical stuff to your garden, then the alchemy class can be pretty linear. But if anyone with the alchemy class can add stuff to your garden, then each person needs their own, very different concept of how alchemy should work. Otherwise there's no advantage to having multiple alchemists.
Well, anyway, that's just a quick example, half of a Harry-Potterlike. You can do the same kind of thing with any setting. Just make sure that the classes build with each other on a shared framework, and resonate well with the more active play sections.
There are also other options, such as having these things be part of the active play session... I've barely scratched the surface of the possibilities here.
Thursday, October 09, 2014
Cooperative vs Collaborative
Recently I've hit on some really neat little ideas. They came from one basic concept: there is a line between cooperative play and collaborative play. They are different.
Right now, collaborative play doesn't exist in computer games. There are collaborative games, but they don't involve collaborative play. For example, in Spore you collaborate with the player base to populate the universe with aliens - but there's no play involved. It just happens. Similarly, in Sim City you can collaborate by having neighboring cities, but the only "play" involved is trying to have the right kinds of inputs and outputs.
Mods are collaborative by nature, but although they create play, they don't use collaborative play. They are created by one person and used by another without any play between the two.
I think this is a big oversight. I think there is a lot of potential that we haven't really investigated.
There are things with collaborative play. Most tabletop RPGs are collaborative. The underlying structure of the game provides a framework of statistics and mechanics, and the players can build their own stories on top of that foundation. Putting aside the actions of the GM, the players collaborate with each other to distinguish their characters, move the experience in the way they prefer, and help augment another player's actions.
Jazz is collaborative in basically the same way. The foundation of jazz is a set of musical patterns that give everyone a similar foundation. They can collaborate with each other to distinguish themselves, move the experience in a way they like, and augment other players' music.
Most collaborative play today is face to face, and uses the incredibly fluid and nuanced signals inherent in human socialization. This allows collaborators to "stay on the same page", and collaborate tightly with each other.
However, that's not really possible in a video game. The most nuanced signals in a video game are less nuanced than a facial expression, and they flow less smoothly. Even incidental signals, like the timing of your turn, are more effort than a raised eyebrow.
We just have to live with that. We need to live with the fact that, aside from voice chat, we're going to rely on in-game signaling to synchronize our collaborators. That means slower, rougher, more awkward synchs.
The good news is that it also means we can save and play back signals.
The basic idea is that we can trickle in a bunch signals bit by bit, then let them flow over another user all at once. Asynchronous collaboration.
Minecraft multiplayer is probably the biggest current example of this. In shared universes, you can collaborate really entertainingly. This is often done asynchronously - the players aren't directly working on the same rooms at the same time. In fact, if playing is done synchronously, it's often cooperative play (exploring/mining ore) rather than collaborative play (building houses).
Asynchronous construction allows players to spend hours building their house on their own, without a whole lot of interference. Other players that visit the house are exposed to all those decisions in a quick and fluid experience as they wander around the house. It can even be done synchronously, with the host explaining the house as you walk. The host sets the stage ("this is the bedroom, and there's a secret passage behind the bookshelf...") and the nuance is provided by the level (exact placement of beds, nature of ceiling, choice of furniture, etc).
Minecraft doesn't really focus on that idea, so let's take this a few steps further.
The first step we want to take is to step on our own feet.
Because our game is the storehouse of signals, we can play back signals whenever we like. That includes allowing the player to collaborate with themself.
Let's draw the idea more clearly using The Sims.
In The Sims, you will typically play off of your own content. You have a house full of people, and you make decisions based on the nature of those people. However, even though each day builds off the last day, you are not "collaborating with yourself" in the way we're talking about, because the content is not represented as if it belonged to someone else. You always have full authority.
Now, on the other hand, if you build a second family in that neighborhood and invite the first family over - now you are collaborating with yourself. The original family is no longer "yours". They are presented as if they were created and controlled by someone else, and that someone else just happens to be "past you".
The Sims doesn't have a lot of persistent nuanced signals, so this collaboration isn't as rich as it might be. Mostly, The Sims relies on a player's internal fictions - if I download your family, I won't glimpse the rich lives you've built around them. The only signal from you that I can see is their appearance and maybe their basic personality.
Now, Kerbal has a LOT of persistent nuanced signals. Not just because the ships can be designed so diversely, no - that's only a small part of it. It's because modding plays a huge role in how Kerbal plays. You can tell which mods someone has installed by the parts on their ships, yeah. But you can also tell what role within the arc of that mod the ship plays, and how the player is interleaving their mods.
These gameplay-centric signals are a great idea, but it does require that the game vary massively from player to player, to the point where each player has an exceptionally wide number of in-game, mechanically-supported goals.
In Minecraft, that's not usually the case. No matter how awesome your house is, there's only a few mechanically-supported goals, and most of them aren't very nuanced. Instead, the value of a home in Minecraft lies in its sense of style.
This lets players put some of their personal style into the house, but I don't think that's anywhere near good enough. See, most people are not architects. We can build voxel homes, but we can't communicate very well with the nuances of these designs.
Most players are concerned with being people. So... perhaps the signals we should let them build should reflect the fictional people in the world?
A lot of Minecraft mansions try to do just that. The mansion is filled with decorations that suit the fictional lives of the player. Nonfunctional furniture, desks that will never get used, decorative racks of armor that will never be appreciated...
Some of the mansions contain multiple fictional people living fictional lives. "This ship I built has 12 sailors. This is where they sleep, this is where they eat..."
But that's just the surface of what's possible if we actually let the players create that content instead of just keeping it in their head where nobody else can see it.
There are a lot of possible ways to let players build their own people-living-lives content. One is to let them place NPCs. However, I think that's not very good, because NPC behavior will be very sterile, especially if modded furniture is introduced and they don't know what to make of it.
My recommendation instead is to build machinima systems. IE, you become a sailor. You "record" yourself sleeping in a bunk, eating at a table, scrubbing the floor. NPCs can play back those recorded bits, with the sterile pieces of their behavior being limited to pathfinding from bit to bit.
Allow bits to link up: I record myself as a pirate captain, I record myself responding to my pirate captain as a first mate, and now there are skits that can play. Collaborating with myself.
This is a very basic system that doesn't take into account how these NPCs should react to a new presence. But it's a damn sight more interesting than not having NPCs.
Players that are allowed to can further build out your scenario. Adding new places, new skits, new NPCs...
Sounds like a pretty great way to add nuanced content and collaborate with other players.
Sounds fun to me!
This is just one of the ideas that started to arise when I started to think about collaboration as a distinct kind of play. There's lots of space here!
Right now, collaborative play doesn't exist in computer games. There are collaborative games, but they don't involve collaborative play. For example, in Spore you collaborate with the player base to populate the universe with aliens - but there's no play involved. It just happens. Similarly, in Sim City you can collaborate by having neighboring cities, but the only "play" involved is trying to have the right kinds of inputs and outputs.
Mods are collaborative by nature, but although they create play, they don't use collaborative play. They are created by one person and used by another without any play between the two.
I think this is a big oversight. I think there is a lot of potential that we haven't really investigated.
There are things with collaborative play. Most tabletop RPGs are collaborative. The underlying structure of the game provides a framework of statistics and mechanics, and the players can build their own stories on top of that foundation. Putting aside the actions of the GM, the players collaborate with each other to distinguish their characters, move the experience in the way they prefer, and help augment another player's actions.
Jazz is collaborative in basically the same way. The foundation of jazz is a set of musical patterns that give everyone a similar foundation. They can collaborate with each other to distinguish themselves, move the experience in a way they like, and augment other players' music.
Most collaborative play today is face to face, and uses the incredibly fluid and nuanced signals inherent in human socialization. This allows collaborators to "stay on the same page", and collaborate tightly with each other.
However, that's not really possible in a video game. The most nuanced signals in a video game are less nuanced than a facial expression, and they flow less smoothly. Even incidental signals, like the timing of your turn, are more effort than a raised eyebrow.
We just have to live with that. We need to live with the fact that, aside from voice chat, we're going to rely on in-game signaling to synchronize our collaborators. That means slower, rougher, more awkward synchs.
The good news is that it also means we can save and play back signals.
The basic idea is that we can trickle in a bunch signals bit by bit, then let them flow over another user all at once. Asynchronous collaboration.
Minecraft multiplayer is probably the biggest current example of this. In shared universes, you can collaborate really entertainingly. This is often done asynchronously - the players aren't directly working on the same rooms at the same time. In fact, if playing is done synchronously, it's often cooperative play (exploring/mining ore) rather than collaborative play (building houses).
Asynchronous construction allows players to spend hours building their house on their own, without a whole lot of interference. Other players that visit the house are exposed to all those decisions in a quick and fluid experience as they wander around the house. It can even be done synchronously, with the host explaining the house as you walk. The host sets the stage ("this is the bedroom, and there's a secret passage behind the bookshelf...") and the nuance is provided by the level (exact placement of beds, nature of ceiling, choice of furniture, etc).
Minecraft doesn't really focus on that idea, so let's take this a few steps further.
The first step we want to take is to step on our own feet.
Because our game is the storehouse of signals, we can play back signals whenever we like. That includes allowing the player to collaborate with themself.
Let's draw the idea more clearly using The Sims.
In The Sims, you will typically play off of your own content. You have a house full of people, and you make decisions based on the nature of those people. However, even though each day builds off the last day, you are not "collaborating with yourself" in the way we're talking about, because the content is not represented as if it belonged to someone else. You always have full authority.
Now, on the other hand, if you build a second family in that neighborhood and invite the first family over - now you are collaborating with yourself. The original family is no longer "yours". They are presented as if they were created and controlled by someone else, and that someone else just happens to be "past you".
The Sims doesn't have a lot of persistent nuanced signals, so this collaboration isn't as rich as it might be. Mostly, The Sims relies on a player's internal fictions - if I download your family, I won't glimpse the rich lives you've built around them. The only signal from you that I can see is their appearance and maybe their basic personality.
Now, Kerbal has a LOT of persistent nuanced signals. Not just because the ships can be designed so diversely, no - that's only a small part of it. It's because modding plays a huge role in how Kerbal plays. You can tell which mods someone has installed by the parts on their ships, yeah. But you can also tell what role within the arc of that mod the ship plays, and how the player is interleaving their mods.
These gameplay-centric signals are a great idea, but it does require that the game vary massively from player to player, to the point where each player has an exceptionally wide number of in-game, mechanically-supported goals.
In Minecraft, that's not usually the case. No matter how awesome your house is, there's only a few mechanically-supported goals, and most of them aren't very nuanced. Instead, the value of a home in Minecraft lies in its sense of style.
This lets players put some of their personal style into the house, but I don't think that's anywhere near good enough. See, most people are not architects. We can build voxel homes, but we can't communicate very well with the nuances of these designs.
Most players are concerned with being people. So... perhaps the signals we should let them build should reflect the fictional people in the world?
A lot of Minecraft mansions try to do just that. The mansion is filled with decorations that suit the fictional lives of the player. Nonfunctional furniture, desks that will never get used, decorative racks of armor that will never be appreciated...
Some of the mansions contain multiple fictional people living fictional lives. "This ship I built has 12 sailors. This is where they sleep, this is where they eat..."
But that's just the surface of what's possible if we actually let the players create that content instead of just keeping it in their head where nobody else can see it.
There are a lot of possible ways to let players build their own people-living-lives content. One is to let them place NPCs. However, I think that's not very good, because NPC behavior will be very sterile, especially if modded furniture is introduced and they don't know what to make of it.
My recommendation instead is to build machinima systems. IE, you become a sailor. You "record" yourself sleeping in a bunk, eating at a table, scrubbing the floor. NPCs can play back those recorded bits, with the sterile pieces of their behavior being limited to pathfinding from bit to bit.
Allow bits to link up: I record myself as a pirate captain, I record myself responding to my pirate captain as a first mate, and now there are skits that can play. Collaborating with myself.
This is a very basic system that doesn't take into account how these NPCs should react to a new presence. But it's a damn sight more interesting than not having NPCs.
Players that are allowed to can further build out your scenario. Adding new places, new skits, new NPCs...
Sounds like a pretty great way to add nuanced content and collaborate with other players.
Sounds fun to me!
This is just one of the ideas that started to arise when I started to think about collaboration as a distinct kind of play. There's lots of space here!
Tuesday, October 07, 2014
Integrating Mods
I like mods. I'd like to talk about how to integrate mods into the core game. I'd like to talk about the future of mods. So let's start with the current generation of mods.
Right now, there are four reigning kings of mods. Kings and queens? Four reigning prime ministers of mods.
These four ministers of mods are Kerbal, Space Engineers, Skyrim, and Minecraft. I haven't done much Minecraft modding, so we'll put that aside and I'll explain my thoughts using the first three.
Kerbal and Space Engineers have similar fundamentals, so their mods often end up having a similar impact on the game. Both games feature picking parts out of a huge list and choosing where to put them. In short, they are construction games.
Most mods for these games add parts. However, this leads to swamping. No matter how many filters and categories you add, the player is tasked to consider all of these parts as potential components at all times. Kerbal has introduced a nice smooth slope via career mode, and Space Engineers is working towards a very diverse set of categories, but neither approach is perfect. In both cases the player will eventually have to be familiar with all parts all the time, and that means the guidance just delays the inevitable.
There are mods that are about things other than parts, but we'll talk about that later. Instead, let's talk about Skyrim.
Many of Skyrim's mods are also about adding stuff into the game - the Skyrim equivalent of "parts". Armor, weapons, spells, NPCs, foods, monsters, dungeons - add it all in and stir it up!
No matter how many Skyrim mods you add, you are unlikely to feel swamped. Even if you add 10,000 new swords, you're not likely to feel like you're drowning in swords. The reason is simple: you are never given a list of swords.
Skyrim is not a construction game, it's a scrounging game. Because of this, there is never a complete list of stuff. You stumble across it - a shop might have one or two, a bandit might equip one, one might pop up in a dungeon somewhere. You are never asked to pick a spear from the 10,000 possible spears. Instead, you're asked to pick between a Spear of Winter's Breath or a Kingfisher Spear.
In Skyrim, stuff is terrain. If you add more stuff, you widen the terrain. The player walks along and stumbles across the things you have added. They can choose whether to carry it with them as they go, or ignore it, or destroy it, or whatever.
The longer the player walks, the more times they stumble across mod content. And, of course, if the player knows what mods they want to focus on, they can seek out that place first and get that stuff first.
The equivalent would be if mods in Kerbal didn't add parts to your rocket construction facility, but instead scattered parts around the cosmos. If you went to the Mun, it wouldn't be to get science. It'd be to collect parts that are seeded there. There would have to be "core packs" too, of course, especially if we want to design decent-looking spaceplanes.
Anyway, these kinds of mods are "content packs".
There's also mods that change how the game works, and mods that do both at the same time. For example, Kerbal's "remote tech" mod, which radically changes how probes and communication work. Or any of Skyrim's "magic rebalancing" mods which change how magic works.
Functional packs that change how things work (while perhaps also introducing new content) are rarer than content packs for a few reasons. One is that it is way harder to program a new kind of activity than to just give new stats to a sword.
But even if they were the same difficulty, a player would still have more content packs installed than function packs. The reason is because of conflicts.
When designing for the future of mods, conflicts are at the heart of our considerations. The future of mods involves dozens, hundreds of mods installed at the same time. Conflicts will arise.
One kind of conflict is just in the player's head. For example, Kerbal has several life support mods. Aside from some minor resource overlapping due to shared resource names, none of them really conflict-conflict. It just doesn't make much sense to have them installed at the same time.
These are "categorical conflicts". Categorical conflicts are limits on the concept of your game. If all the players rush to create the same three mods over and over, it means that they all see your game as lacking in the same fundamental place. However, if the players create dozens of different mods and they rarely have any category conflicts, it means your game is a strong platform for them to explore their interests.
This doesn't necessarily apply to all categories. For example, Skyrim has hundreds of mods about sex and nudity: that's obviously a category the players really wanted to explore. But Skyrim also has dozens of mods about tweaking the rendering settings. That's not really a category in the game so much a thing the game does.
This is a "system conflict": the game has a system that works in a specific way, and two mods that both change that system are likely to conflict. Two mods that change how things render. Two mods that change how airplanes fly.
Kerbal life support mods are not a system conflict, because there was no system for life support in the game. But replacing the planet textures is a system conflict.
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether something is a category conflict or a system conflict. For example, the dozens of Skyrim mods that replace the base body and armor meshes/textures. These categories are not exclusive: many system conflicts are also category conflicts. One tells you what the players are interested in, the other tells you what the game is capable of.
"Resource conflicts" are the last type. This is when two mods conflict due to bad engineering. For example, one Skyrim mod which allows you to kill sleeping people, and another that allows you to drink their blood. When you hit the action button, which action happens?
That's a minor conflict, because most mods learned to add options to a context menu instead of overriding the basic operations. But there are similar conflicts that are more persistent: a mod that makes your NPCs loiter around towns realistically conflicts with a mod that makes them follow you in a more tactically-sound way. The conflict only exists because the NPCs don't understand that they should behave differently between a town and a dungeon.
When engineering a moddable game, it's probably worthwhile to consider these kinds of conflicts and understand how they will shape the modding community.
Categorical conflicts aren't necessarily bad - they let the player base cooperate in a specific way - but keep in mind that these will give rise to all-encompassing mods that dominate your modding community. These huge, complex mods will conflict with everything and everyone, so you need to give the modders the tools to subdivide their mods and/or create variations to get along with other mods.
Skyrim does this well - not through any effort of the Skyrim devs, but through efforts of the modding community. An in-game mod management console and an out-of-game mod install tool both offer players a bevy of options to specify not only what they want the mod to do, but also what mods they would like it to be compatible with.
Larger mods will have versioning, so the mod system should support versions right from the start, and allow for comparing the same mod to itself to see which one is more recent. Ideally, it should even support contacting a server to check whether the installed version is out of date. Super-ideally, a P2P system could be used to host mods to prevent centralization issues such as a primary distributor being bought out by Curse.
If you don't include these features, they'll probably arise on their own, but that usually means a pretty mangy, stumbling distribution system that will fall over dead randomly.
Moving down into the game itself, to prevent resource conflicts you should try to make flexible API integration for mods. Kerbal has a pretty good example of this in their resources system, where mods can specify the nature of resources such as oxygen, water, karbonite, etc. This doesn't require any C# code or libraries or anything, and every mod can access the resources.
A slightly better way to do it would be to allow mods to have part lists inside of resource/mod checks. IE, "if oxygen has been defined, add these three parts, otherwise don't bother" or "if Remote Tech is installed, use these parts instead of these". Allowing the mod to ask the player about configuration both up-front and in an in-game window should also be possible with a simple line of script. If conflicts arise, allow the player to choose which mod has supremacy, perhaps after checking with each mod for a fallback state.
Mods which are modular are probably going to slowly gain importance, so allowing modders to let players turn on and off bits of their mods will probably be more and more important.
However, all that stuff is the basic stuff. What we're really interested in is how mods are integrated into the game.
Those ideas are all about functional mods. But most mods are and will probably always be content packs. In fact, content packs are likely to become so prevalent that players will be creating and downloading them without even thinking of them as content packs, such as with Spore's creature sharing.
Content is going to explode. Space Engineers is touching on this - they let players create ships, and now their game infrastructure is buckling under the demand for better, faster, more interesting sharing options.
In addition to the skyrocketing amount of content and demands for ever-more-flexible content sharing capabilities, there's also the bugaboo that content packs often rely on other mods. If I have a mod which flies random player-created ships through my Space Engineers game, what happens when those ships have mods I do not have?
The Kerbal fail state is self-destruction: the ship flat-out can't be loaded. Space Engineers is slightly less bad, but you're still going to end up with busted ships.
Even if you autoshare mods, the mods will conflict!
The answer is wrappers.
Mod wrappers are in-game conceits that control which mods work, when. Rather than a mod flat-out overwriting the game's base code, the mod's code is only called when the game is "inside" the wrapper.
In Kerbal, that could be "space agency". So if Kerbal implemented a ship-sharing system with automatic mod-loading (impossible given their code base but let's pretend), the idea would be that your friend's ship would belong to their space agency. In turn, the mods their ship uses are considered separately from the mods you're using. Some might allow crosstalk - for example, if you both have a version of Remote Tech installed, the ships might be able to relay for each other. Others might be similar but incompatible, and not allow crosstalk - you have Remote Tech, she has Antenna Range.
The key to wrappers is figuring out the edges. What happens when one of your ships and one of her ships dock?
In Kerbal, the two ships are merged. So, what happens with the mods?
One option is to not allow ships from different agencies to dock. Another is to assign one player as leader and shut down all the mods from the other player - the parts that serve those mods are still loaded, but they are dormant. Another is to make the mods list actually per-part rather than per-agency - although the overhead might get absurd.
Imagine if in the next Elder Scrolls game, mods were by region. As you moved from land to land, things changed - the rendering changed, the rules of stealth changed, which swords were available changed. If you conquer a land, you can choose to change the mods. If you are playing multiplayer, you can shift between their world and yours, and the mods may change...
Anyway, the key to this concept is that the wrappers are clear in-game concepts that allow players to choose exactly what mods should be applied where. These aren't normally under the control of the modders.
To allow this, your code base will need to allow mods to register themselves rather than simply overwriting the game's base function. Your mod API needs to support not just the mod's capabilities within the game, but also the way the game knows the mod exists. It should allow mods to ask which mods are active in which wrappers, and it should ask mods whether they have anything to contribute.
For example, a sword content pack might have 10,000 different swords. Rather than making the mod responsible for littering the swords around the world, the mod would instead tell the game it has opinions about swords (or weapons). Whenever choosing weapons (for NPCs, for stores, as loot), the game would ask all interested mods whether they have any suggestions. Then the game creates a weighted stack and doles out the final result to the player. When you ask the mod for suggestions, you pass it an information pack it can ask questions from - what culture is it? How rich? What level?
If you want to be extra-safe, once you've collected a list, run the list back through the mods to see if they have any weighting adjustments they want to make. This would allow mods to synergize, or shut off the default content, or similar.
Even the information pack should be linked to this concept of suggestions from mods. The base content adds in level, wealth, culture, etc. But a mod might overlay a "biome" information bit, or a "minerals" bit, or any number of other things. This allows functional mods to behave in a way very similar to content mods with a minimum of hacking into the core game code.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the mods of the future. I hope some of these ideas become common.
Right now, there are four reigning kings of mods. Kings and queens? Four reigning prime ministers of mods.
These four ministers of mods are Kerbal, Space Engineers, Skyrim, and Minecraft. I haven't done much Minecraft modding, so we'll put that aside and I'll explain my thoughts using the first three.
Kerbal and Space Engineers have similar fundamentals, so their mods often end up having a similar impact on the game. Both games feature picking parts out of a huge list and choosing where to put them. In short, they are construction games.
Most mods for these games add parts. However, this leads to swamping. No matter how many filters and categories you add, the player is tasked to consider all of these parts as potential components at all times. Kerbal has introduced a nice smooth slope via career mode, and Space Engineers is working towards a very diverse set of categories, but neither approach is perfect. In both cases the player will eventually have to be familiar with all parts all the time, and that means the guidance just delays the inevitable.
There are mods that are about things other than parts, but we'll talk about that later. Instead, let's talk about Skyrim.
Many of Skyrim's mods are also about adding stuff into the game - the Skyrim equivalent of "parts". Armor, weapons, spells, NPCs, foods, monsters, dungeons - add it all in and stir it up!
No matter how many Skyrim mods you add, you are unlikely to feel swamped. Even if you add 10,000 new swords, you're not likely to feel like you're drowning in swords. The reason is simple: you are never given a list of swords.
Skyrim is not a construction game, it's a scrounging game. Because of this, there is never a complete list of stuff. You stumble across it - a shop might have one or two, a bandit might equip one, one might pop up in a dungeon somewhere. You are never asked to pick a spear from the 10,000 possible spears. Instead, you're asked to pick between a Spear of Winter's Breath or a Kingfisher Spear.
In Skyrim, stuff is terrain. If you add more stuff, you widen the terrain. The player walks along and stumbles across the things you have added. They can choose whether to carry it with them as they go, or ignore it, or destroy it, or whatever.
The longer the player walks, the more times they stumble across mod content. And, of course, if the player knows what mods they want to focus on, they can seek out that place first and get that stuff first.
The equivalent would be if mods in Kerbal didn't add parts to your rocket construction facility, but instead scattered parts around the cosmos. If you went to the Mun, it wouldn't be to get science. It'd be to collect parts that are seeded there. There would have to be "core packs" too, of course, especially if we want to design decent-looking spaceplanes.
Anyway, these kinds of mods are "content packs".
There's also mods that change how the game works, and mods that do both at the same time. For example, Kerbal's "remote tech" mod, which radically changes how probes and communication work. Or any of Skyrim's "magic rebalancing" mods which change how magic works.
Functional packs that change how things work (while perhaps also introducing new content) are rarer than content packs for a few reasons. One is that it is way harder to program a new kind of activity than to just give new stats to a sword.
But even if they were the same difficulty, a player would still have more content packs installed than function packs. The reason is because of conflicts.
When designing for the future of mods, conflicts are at the heart of our considerations. The future of mods involves dozens, hundreds of mods installed at the same time. Conflicts will arise.
One kind of conflict is just in the player's head. For example, Kerbal has several life support mods. Aside from some minor resource overlapping due to shared resource names, none of them really conflict-conflict. It just doesn't make much sense to have them installed at the same time.
These are "categorical conflicts". Categorical conflicts are limits on the concept of your game. If all the players rush to create the same three mods over and over, it means that they all see your game as lacking in the same fundamental place. However, if the players create dozens of different mods and they rarely have any category conflicts, it means your game is a strong platform for them to explore their interests.
This doesn't necessarily apply to all categories. For example, Skyrim has hundreds of mods about sex and nudity: that's obviously a category the players really wanted to explore. But Skyrim also has dozens of mods about tweaking the rendering settings. That's not really a category in the game so much a thing the game does.
This is a "system conflict": the game has a system that works in a specific way, and two mods that both change that system are likely to conflict. Two mods that change how things render. Two mods that change how airplanes fly.
Kerbal life support mods are not a system conflict, because there was no system for life support in the game. But replacing the planet textures is a system conflict.
Sometimes it's hard to tell whether something is a category conflict or a system conflict. For example, the dozens of Skyrim mods that replace the base body and armor meshes/textures. These categories are not exclusive: many system conflicts are also category conflicts. One tells you what the players are interested in, the other tells you what the game is capable of.
"Resource conflicts" are the last type. This is when two mods conflict due to bad engineering. For example, one Skyrim mod which allows you to kill sleeping people, and another that allows you to drink their blood. When you hit the action button, which action happens?
That's a minor conflict, because most mods learned to add options to a context menu instead of overriding the basic operations. But there are similar conflicts that are more persistent: a mod that makes your NPCs loiter around towns realistically conflicts with a mod that makes them follow you in a more tactically-sound way. The conflict only exists because the NPCs don't understand that they should behave differently between a town and a dungeon.
When engineering a moddable game, it's probably worthwhile to consider these kinds of conflicts and understand how they will shape the modding community.
Categorical conflicts aren't necessarily bad - they let the player base cooperate in a specific way - but keep in mind that these will give rise to all-encompassing mods that dominate your modding community. These huge, complex mods will conflict with everything and everyone, so you need to give the modders the tools to subdivide their mods and/or create variations to get along with other mods.
Skyrim does this well - not through any effort of the Skyrim devs, but through efforts of the modding community. An in-game mod management console and an out-of-game mod install tool both offer players a bevy of options to specify not only what they want the mod to do, but also what mods they would like it to be compatible with.
Larger mods will have versioning, so the mod system should support versions right from the start, and allow for comparing the same mod to itself to see which one is more recent. Ideally, it should even support contacting a server to check whether the installed version is out of date. Super-ideally, a P2P system could be used to host mods to prevent centralization issues such as a primary distributor being bought out by Curse.
If you don't include these features, they'll probably arise on their own, but that usually means a pretty mangy, stumbling distribution system that will fall over dead randomly.
Moving down into the game itself, to prevent resource conflicts you should try to make flexible API integration for mods. Kerbal has a pretty good example of this in their resources system, where mods can specify the nature of resources such as oxygen, water, karbonite, etc. This doesn't require any C# code or libraries or anything, and every mod can access the resources.
A slightly better way to do it would be to allow mods to have part lists inside of resource/mod checks. IE, "if oxygen has been defined, add these three parts, otherwise don't bother" or "if Remote Tech is installed, use these parts instead of these". Allowing the mod to ask the player about configuration both up-front and in an in-game window should also be possible with a simple line of script. If conflicts arise, allow the player to choose which mod has supremacy, perhaps after checking with each mod for a fallback state.
Mods which are modular are probably going to slowly gain importance, so allowing modders to let players turn on and off bits of their mods will probably be more and more important.
However, all that stuff is the basic stuff. What we're really interested in is how mods are integrated into the game.
Those ideas are all about functional mods. But most mods are and will probably always be content packs. In fact, content packs are likely to become so prevalent that players will be creating and downloading them without even thinking of them as content packs, such as with Spore's creature sharing.
Content is going to explode. Space Engineers is touching on this - they let players create ships, and now their game infrastructure is buckling under the demand for better, faster, more interesting sharing options.
In addition to the skyrocketing amount of content and demands for ever-more-flexible content sharing capabilities, there's also the bugaboo that content packs often rely on other mods. If I have a mod which flies random player-created ships through my Space Engineers game, what happens when those ships have mods I do not have?
The Kerbal fail state is self-destruction: the ship flat-out can't be loaded. Space Engineers is slightly less bad, but you're still going to end up with busted ships.
Even if you autoshare mods, the mods will conflict!
The answer is wrappers.
Mod wrappers are in-game conceits that control which mods work, when. Rather than a mod flat-out overwriting the game's base code, the mod's code is only called when the game is "inside" the wrapper.
In Kerbal, that could be "space agency". So if Kerbal implemented a ship-sharing system with automatic mod-loading (impossible given their code base but let's pretend), the idea would be that your friend's ship would belong to their space agency. In turn, the mods their ship uses are considered separately from the mods you're using. Some might allow crosstalk - for example, if you both have a version of Remote Tech installed, the ships might be able to relay for each other. Others might be similar but incompatible, and not allow crosstalk - you have Remote Tech, she has Antenna Range.
The key to wrappers is figuring out the edges. What happens when one of your ships and one of her ships dock?
In Kerbal, the two ships are merged. So, what happens with the mods?
One option is to not allow ships from different agencies to dock. Another is to assign one player as leader and shut down all the mods from the other player - the parts that serve those mods are still loaded, but they are dormant. Another is to make the mods list actually per-part rather than per-agency - although the overhead might get absurd.
Imagine if in the next Elder Scrolls game, mods were by region. As you moved from land to land, things changed - the rendering changed, the rules of stealth changed, which swords were available changed. If you conquer a land, you can choose to change the mods. If you are playing multiplayer, you can shift between their world and yours, and the mods may change...
Anyway, the key to this concept is that the wrappers are clear in-game concepts that allow players to choose exactly what mods should be applied where. These aren't normally under the control of the modders.
To allow this, your code base will need to allow mods to register themselves rather than simply overwriting the game's base function. Your mod API needs to support not just the mod's capabilities within the game, but also the way the game knows the mod exists. It should allow mods to ask which mods are active in which wrappers, and it should ask mods whether they have anything to contribute.
For example, a sword content pack might have 10,000 different swords. Rather than making the mod responsible for littering the swords around the world, the mod would instead tell the game it has opinions about swords (or weapons). Whenever choosing weapons (for NPCs, for stores, as loot), the game would ask all interested mods whether they have any suggestions. Then the game creates a weighted stack and doles out the final result to the player. When you ask the mod for suggestions, you pass it an information pack it can ask questions from - what culture is it? How rich? What level?
If you want to be extra-safe, once you've collected a list, run the list back through the mods to see if they have any weighting adjustments they want to make. This would allow mods to synergize, or shut off the default content, or similar.
Even the information pack should be linked to this concept of suggestions from mods. The base content adds in level, wealth, culture, etc. But a mod might overlay a "biome" information bit, or a "minerals" bit, or any number of other things. This allows functional mods to behave in a way very similar to content mods with a minimum of hacking into the core game code.
Anyway, I'm looking forward to the mods of the future. I hope some of these ideas become common.
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